Group: FSF:office volunteers

Volunteering at the Free Software Foundation Offices

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 usually can't talk for very long.

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
• Make Sticker Packs
• Help 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 that we have in stock.

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.

• 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.

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

Scanning old files

The files we are scanning are copyright assignments and employer disclaimers. These are the legal documents that people sign when they contribute to the GNU project. 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 unorganized fashion, and without giving them individual file names.

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

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.

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.

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

• 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. In that case, the first two page document would be selected as 'A1 A3'. (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 the copyright of its employees. In that case, 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.

./splitpdf

Make any fixes necessary, and then once everything is good, make a comment at the end of your splitpdf file saying where you left off scanning. Since you will be sending that file too, it's a way to communicate with Don about the last scanned file.

# I've finished scanning up to 1992 S

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.

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 are also listed here as well.