Alessandro at FSFE

Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to take part to one of the events organised in Italy for the Document Freedom Day. The event was organised by FSUGItalia, and FSFE participated as host. Carlo Piana awarded the City administration of Arezzo for adopting Open Standards within its services.

The event took place in the building of the high school “Francesco Redi”. A good participation of students was recorded.

• The talk of Alexjan Carraturo, president of FSUGItalia presented an introduction to Free Software. Philosophical, as well as practical aspects were introduced to the audience.
• An intervention by Italo Vignoli, director of the Document Foundation, covered the subject of Open Standards within productivity office tools.
• Carlo Piana presented Open Standards from a broader point of view, introducing historical and legal aspects.
• Stefano Baldan, of FSUGItalia presented HTML5, a brand new HTML standard able to manage video and other media contents without external software (which might be proprietary, as in the Flash case).
• Marina Latini presented a particular GNU/Linux distribution (openSuse), in order to give students an example of a ready-to-use Free Software operating system.
• In the afternoon, the opportunity to try and install GNU/Linux was given to interested people.

From my point of view, it was the first Document Freedom Day event I could assist to in Italy. It was interesting indeed to take part to it, after so much international coordination work from Berlin. Useless to say, it was also very interesting to meet other Free Software activists who were involved to the organisation of the event in Arezzo.

The reaction from students, from professors, from the school staff and from the City administration of Arezzo, was very good. I hope that the experience of Arezzo will be a step towards a broader adoption of Open Standards within public organisms in Italy.