This Saturday is Software Freedom Day (Worldwide). From The Software Freedom Website:

Software Freedom Day is a global celebration and education of why transparent and sustainable technologies are now more important than ever. With over 200 teams in 60 countries participating, it is a fantastic event to get your schools and communities involved in. Go along to your local event or start your own event and meet a wide range of people, all working together to help ensure our freedoms are maintained by the technologies of tomorrow.

Locally to me the nearest event, I am aware of, is in Manchester organised by Manchester Free Software details here.

With family commitments I can not go to Manchester on Saturday but it makes me think about what I can do at a personnel level to promote free and open source software. I recently did an Infopoint (http://infopointproject.org) at the Trentham Gardens (Stoke) Northern Computer Market. The purpose of an Infopoint is to promote free software by giving away copies of the Opendisc, and Linux Distros. I gave away mainly Ubuntu. Northern Computer Markets support this by offering free tables where they can. Althought the Infopoint projects website has not been updated for a while Infopoints are still active around the country often supported by local Linux User Groups.

Alan Cocks who is an active organiser of Infopoints and LUG member has also organised the Bracknell Software Freedom Day event details here. I would like to do another Infopoint in the near future possibly in Wolverhampton.

I am also helping my family use free and open source software with my parents and son using Linux Mint and my wife using Ubuntu. I think that helping friends and family use free software is a small thing that all free software enthusiasts can do (and I am sure a lot already do). With two children in primary school I also want to understand how schools are (not) using free software.

A map of all Free Software Events worldwide is here.