Group:FSF:office volunteers

Volunteering at the Free Software Foundation Office

The FSF is always in need of some help around the office. If you are in the Boston area and want to help out, we'd love to have you come by. Our office is located at

51 Franklin Street, 5th floor
Boston, MA 02478
USA

Our office hours are 10am-6pm weekdays, but it is generally a good idea to send an email to sales@fsf.org to give us a heads-up that you are coming by.

Benefits

Many people who have volunteered at the FSF have been accepted as interns, and some of those interns have become employees the FSF. Also, spending time here is a good way to meet the staff, but please note that the staff have work to do, so they often can't talk for very long. Lunch is an hour long at 1:00, and a good time to chat.

Time Dependent Volunteer Opportunities

We have some volunteer opportunities that are time dependent, such as our biannual membership mailing. Those will be announced to our local volunteer mailing list (please email sales@fsf.org to get on the list if you aren't already) but should be listed here as well.

Help Any Time

These are things that we always need help with. They are tasks that are on-going or repeating, so if you ever have free time and want to help out, please join us at the office.

• Sticker Bundling
• Making Sticker Packs
• Helping with Shipping
• Scanning Old Files

Sticker Bundling

Since the FSF often sends out large sticker packs to free software conferences around the world, it's really helpful to have sets of 100 for each sticker type in stock.

Starting Out

If you'd like to to do this job, find the sticker boxes in the closet next to the scanning machine. It is at the back of the office, on the right.

Find sticker types that don't seem to have a lot of bundles, and grab a whole bunch to compile.

Tips

• For individual stickers, it's helpful to count out 5 piles of 10, stack them together, and then make another stack that is the same height right next to it. Put those stacks together, and you have 100 stickers, give or take. Then you can use the same comparing method to quickly make more stacks that are about the same size.

• For stickers on rolls, you can count out 5 stickers, then fold the tape back and forth at that length several more times. You should have a total of 10 folds on the end that only has folds, to get 100 stickers. Once you break off your 100, you can fold the stack of stickers four times in a zig-zag so that you end up with a neat little stack.

Finishing Up

Take your sets of 100 and put a rubber band around each set. Put them back in the box. Thanks!

Making Sticker Packs

The FSF store sells sticker packs of 15. If you'd like, you can try to grab at least one of each sticker type (except for the metal GNU/Linux Inside and other rare stickers). You can find individual stickers in the shipping area next to the conference room. Put the bundles in white FSF envelopes. Finished envelopes go onto the shelf covered in stickers. You may also want to check to see if there are a lot of these envelopes made out already.

Make sure to include at least these stickers

• Free Software Foundation Logo
• GNU head
• Eliminate DRM
• Dynamic Duo
• GPLv3
• A more accurate depiction of Apple's 1984 commercial
• iBad - Bad for your freedom
• Defective By Design Anti-Sony Stickers

Helping with Shipping

The FSF gets orders from its store on a regular basis. If you would like to help fill some of these orders, you can find the requests in the small printer at the back of the office, next to the closet containing stickers. Each order prints two pages, so keep the pages in pairs. Then ask someone to unlock the store closet, and get the requested items.

Please Note

• Take note of the listed version for books and reference cards, as the FSF sells new and old copies. Also, some orders request books signed by rms. Those are in a box on the floor, to the right of the door. Don't give out signed copies if they were not ordered.

• If the shirt is not specified as 'Ladies', then please don't give a ladies shirt. Some ladies shirts are different colors, but others look quite similar. You can check the tag to tell the difference.

• Sometimes order names list '(Package of 10)' next to the item, and may only list a quantity of 1. In that case, the quantity is the number of ten packs that have been ordered.

Common Cryptic Names

• Book bundle: Free as in Freedom book and Free Software, Free Society book
• GNU head: shirt with a GNU head on it
• Sticker pack: pack of 15 stickers (grab the ones from the shipping center, not the store closet, since those have 50.)
• GNU Emblem Classic Pin: golden and black pin. These are in tiny plastic baggies on the sticker shelf at the shipping center.

Short Supplies

If there is short or missing stock in any item, tell Don, and he will help you get more.

Customs Forms

If an order is shipping with International First Class Mail, you need to fill out a customs form for the order. (Other international orders are taken care of online by Don.) The slips are on the upper right shelf above the shipping station, next to the conference room. The From: address needs to be stamped with the FSF's address. Write in the shipping address for the order in the fields below.

Finishing Up

Once you have everything, put the order items in stacks on the wooden table at the shipping station. Place the two pages and any needed customs form for that order on top of the items you have gathered. If there isn't much room, you can also stack the orders, as long as the order pages separate them.

Try to make sure that your order is correct. Even so, your stack will be reviewed before shipping. Thank you!

Scanning Old Files

The files the FSF is scanning are copyright assignments and employer/other disclaimers. These are the legal documents that people sign when they contribute to the GNU project. A disclaimer is permission given by an employer (or school) to let an employee assign their work to the FSF. Right now, the FSF has a nice big stack of them that need to be scanned into .pdf format, so that they can be found quickly when contacted about a possible issue. The FSF hired a company to scan them in all at once, but they did it in an disorganized fashion, and without giving splitting or naming files in a helpful way.

Strategy

The strategy is to scan in a stack of the presorted documents using the automated scanning machine in the back office. Then use a program called 'pdftk' to split up the digital scan into separate .pdf files named after each signer and the targeted GNU project.

Important

It is important to maintain the order of files at all times during this scanning, checking and refiling process. Some documents were originally stapled, but to scan them, they have their staples removed. Not all of these assignments list the person's name on every page, so if the documents get mixed up, that would pose an issue. In any case, documents should be in a partially alphabetic order, which means they do not need to be resorted.

Where to Start

This effort started with the oldest documents first, going from 'A' to 'Z', batched by each letter, so ask Don where the previous volunteer has left off.

Grab a the next section of documents and load them in the scanner. It is important that you remove every last staple. Also, remove any tape holding two sheets together. If you don't, the scanner will jam and possibly tear the pages. Tell the scanner to fax the digital copy to your email address, and start scanning. TODO: Give instructions on how to use the scanner and have it email the documents to yourself. You should watch the scanning process (at least for the first few times), so that you can quickly interrupt it if there is a jam in the machine.

In Order to Split

Next, you need to split the pdf file with pdftk. Here is the source of the script to use when splitting files:

#!/bin/bash 
# Please make the file name the last name of the contributor (first letter capitalized), then a period, then the name of the package in all caps.
# For employer disclaimers, add the word 'disclaimer' after the package name

pdftk A=temp.pdf cat A1-2W output Lastname.PACKAGENAME.pdf


# make sure to add the last scanned document as a comment at the end of this file

• Copy and paste it into a new file named 'splitpdf', and run the following command in the same directory as the file:

chmod +x splitpdf

Editing ./splitpdf

Once you've done that, change the arguments to the first command, instructing pdftk to create a single file for the pages that form a single document.

• The 'A=temp.pdf' part can be left unchanged. the 'A' is a variable that is used as a shorthand in the rest of the command, when referring to temp.pdf.

• 'A1-2W' Tells pdftk to select pages 1 through 2 and to rotate them 'West' (90 degrees CCW). Since you will be scanning both sides of the documents and not all documents use the back side, you will usually need to skip that side, after checking to make sure. In that case, the first two-page document would be selected as 'A1 A3', without the dash. (Odd numbered pages select the front, and even numbered pages select the back.)

• Change the output name, as instructed in the script above. If a document references multiple projects you can list them like 'Smith.GIMP-GLIB-EMACS.pdf'. Make sure to end the file name '.disclaimer.pdf' if it is a disclaimer. Also, sometimes a company will be the entity that assigns its own copyright, instead of assigning the copyright of its employees. In that case, the document is not a disclaimer. Put the company name in place of "Lastname", replacing spaces with dashes.

Then copy and paste your first line on the following one, change the details for the next document, and repeat. Once you've covered all of the documents, run the script and check the resulting pdfs against the stack you scanned.

Splitting the File

./splitpdf

Check your work, make any fixes necessary, remove pdf files with incorrect names that will not be overwritten, then re-run the script. Once everything is correct, make a comment at the end of your splitpdf file saying where you left off scanning. Since you will be emailing that file too, it's a way for Don to take note of the last scanned file.

# I've finished scanning up to 1992 S

Zipping it Up

Zip up the pdfs and splitpdf.

tar czf 1992S.tgz *.pdf splitpdf

Then email the .tgz file to Donald. His address is his name AT fsf.org.