The Free Software Directory is an essential catalog of free software online, composed and maintained by countless volunteers dedicated to the promotion of software that respects your personal liberty. Tens of thousands of people visit the Directory every month to discover free software and explore the information about version control, documentation, and licensing. Adding and maintaining entries to the Directory is crucial work to give people access to free software which has only free dependencies and runs on a free OS. All of this information is also exported in machine-readable formats, making it a valuable source of data for the study of trends in free software. The Directory is powered by MediaWiki, the same software used by Wikipedia.

Every Friday at 12:00-15:00 EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC), volunteers meet on IRC in the #fsf channel on irc.freenode.org to add new entries, update existing ones, and talk about free software together (to see the meeting start time in your time zone, run this in GNU bash: date --date='TZ="America/New_York" 12:00 this Fri'). As with any group composed of volunteers, the informal Directory team has people who come and go, and right now, it could really use some fresh new members to kick our efforts into high gear. The Directory just passed 16,000 entries this year, and as far as we're concerned, there's no limit to how high it should go!

Examples of ways you can help include updating information about existing entries, proposing new entries, or reviewing new entries submitted by others to make sure they meet the Directory's criteria.

If you can't wait or don't have the time to jump onto IRC on Friday afternoons, you can still help: check out the Free Software Directory Participation Guide for instructions.

No matter how you participate, improving the Free Software Directory is an easy, nuts-and-bolts way to make a contribution to the free software movement, bringing us a tinier step every day to a truly free society. We look forward to seeing you on IRC!