Every week free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on irc.freenode.org to help improve the Free Software Directory. This recaps the work we accomplished on the Friday, September 30th, 2016 meeting.

This week we had a special theme of focusing on collaboration related software. This was another big category, but we made some great progress in updating tools for helping people work together. The channel also did some great collaboration in improving the tools we use to work on the directory. adfeno and dachary worked together on the participation guide tools section, improving guides for scripting work in the directory. They made a section in the guide for using pywikibot, a command line, to simplify tasks in the directory.

Iankelling and donaldr3 each started from opposite ends of the project management category and got close to meeting in the middle on updating the pages. jgay helped approve a massive batch of updates to the directory, and mattl was also there to help update entries and provide insight on some of the scripting tasks. The meeting ended up running long after its scheduled end time as everyone wanted to keep working on their projects.

adfeno and Iankelling worked long after the end of even the long-running meeting to put together a resource on broken links in the directory. Using pywikibot they were able to generate a listing of dead external links on the directory. Which means that our first meeting in October will be the 'Meeting of the Undead' where we focus on finding and bring back to life dead links.

If you would like to help hunt for the dead links or just help update the directory in general, meet with us every Friday in #fsf on irc.freenode.org from 12pm to 3pm EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC).

• apl-1.6a
• autoconf-archive-2016.09.16
• autogen-5.18.12
• bash-4.4
• denemo-2.0.12
• drgeo-16.10a
• emacs-25.1
• gawk-4.1.4
• global-6.5.5
• gnucash-2.6.14
• gnuchess-6.2.3
• gnu-c-manual-0.2.5
• gnutls-3.5.4
• gsl-2.2.1
• libmicrohttpd-0.9.51
• libosip2-5.0.0
• nano-2.7.0
• parallel-20160922
• readline-7.0
• texinfo-6.3
• unifont-9.0.02
• xorriso-1.4.6

For announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu.

To download: nearly all GNU software is available from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors from https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html. You can use the url https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

This month, we welcome Boris Bobrov as the new GNU MediaGoblin co-maintainer.

A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance: please see https://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at https://www.gnu.org/help/help.html.

If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package, see https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.

As always, please feel free to write to us at maintainers@gnu.org with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.

The keynote addresses will be delivered by the FSF’s own Richard M. Stallman, former Chief Open Education Advisor Andrew Marcinek and founder of HacKIDemia Stefania Druga. At the event, there will be a special tribute to Dr. Seymour Papert (the father of educational computing) by Dr. Cynthia Solomon.

The event will have workshops and presentations given by over 20 speakers, with perspectives from the free software, maker education, open education communities and more. The event will challenge participants with the theme “From Play to Policy," leading to next steps for the community.

Here are the details:

http://www.librelearnlab.org

Saturday, October 8th and Sunday, October 9th

MIT Tang Center

Cost: $25, or Free (as in beer) for students. Registration is optional if only attending Dr. Richard Stallman’s talk, “Education for Freedom with Libre Software.” If you plan to attend the rest of the event, please register.

Join the FSF and friends Friday, September 30th, from 12pm to 3pm EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.

Participate in supporting the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode.

Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to discover free software. Each entry in the Directory contains a wealth of useful information, from basic category and descriptions, to providing detailed info about version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing info that has been carefully checked by FSF staff and trained volunteers.

While the Free Software Directory has been and continues to be a great resource to the world over the past decade, it has the potential of being a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help!

This week we're having a special theme focusing on updating entries for collaborative software. Working together as a team takes tools that let you plan, communicate, and collaborate, so making sure people have great free software for these tasks is really important. Come collaborate with all of us in updating the directory entries for these tools!

If you are eager to help and you can't wait or are simply unable to make it onto IRC on Friday, our participation guide will provide you with all the information you need to get started on helping the Directory today! There are also weekly FSD Meetings pages that everyone is welcome to contribute to before, during, and after each meeting.