2008/Ireland

From Document Freedom Day

Yesterday, March 26th, was the first international Document Freedom Day, and Team DkIT (Dundalk Institute of Technology) was out on the campaign trail all day!

Andrew Clarke and Paul Scollon were on campus all day going from office to office, computer lab to computer lab, preaching open document formats to unsuspecting staff and student alike! Wearing Document Freedom Day T-Shirts and armed with official handouts, we handed out free copies of both OpenOffice.org and the OpenDisc while explaining why people should use them. In all we handed out over 70 CDs and secured promises from everyone to make at least 2 copies of the discs and save at least one ODF document that day. Many people claimed to feeling liberated and a lot more aware about Open Documents than before yesterday.

The overall response and feedback was very positive indeed, with the entire college library staff and many other staff members requesting alternative office software to be rolled out to their areas so that they may use open document formats. Many students indicated that they would be using the same software on their personal laptops as opposed to purchasing any other off-the-shelf software (their have been numerous problems on campus with certain document formats). They were particularly interest in OpenOffice.org's ability to convert straight to PDF from the toolbar.

You can read our full report here