Happy Document Freedom Day!

Yup, it's today, happy Document Freedom Day! For those that don't know what's this all about, Document Freedom Day is a worldwide event to celebrate and promote Document Freedom and Open Standards. As I put it on the "Testimonials" page,

Open Standards and Document Freedom are not only essential, but its importance is more visible as time passes by. From official documents and government websites to cientific archives or medical records, citizens in the digital era deal - or try to - with digital documents every day. It is crucial not only to ensure that they can easily do so, without obstacles, but also to prevent us from a dark future, by providing the right means of archival of all that information.

ANSOL is going to spend the day doing cool things about the issue, but as always we wanted also to party to everyone interested, so we're organizing a nice dinner party, and you are of course invited! If you're not in Portugal that's no excuse: there are 48 events in 21 different countries: some parties, some educational, but all of them fun! If you think Open Standards are not that important, consider this: in 2004, during the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the rescue operators of different countries were unable to exchange information about the ongoing operations, because they all used different closed formats of documents. This massively slowed down and complicated the coordination of rescue actions. Lots of human lives were put into danger just because vendors did not care about use of open standards in their products. And this is just one example. So, what are you waiting for? Join us!