Free Software with a Female touch

Today is the first day of work on organizing my stuff here in Brazil in order to move to Zurich.

I’m a bit sad about being not close anymore (at least physically) of my friends of FSFLA, but also it’s exciting to know that I’ll be joining another group. Usually I don’t unjoin the groups I enter, so I plan to keep working mainly to FSFLA, but it will be impossible to not participate and get involved on FSFE activities.

I hope to meet you folks around there to get some beers and share experience on how to help to save the world 🙂

Pamela Jones just published today one article written by me about women in Free Software at Groklaw.

Well, after a long time without post anything here, I’m back. I promisse that it will not take so long until I post here a bit more of my crazy thinks and adventures.

After a weekend with people (the psl’s server) in maintance, I’m finishing to put my personal website back online, and few more websites which I maintain.

Loooooong day doing that, now I think I’ll go bed (actually I’m seated on my bed right now). Ok, go sleep then.

I had the opportunity to meet some people from Montreal last FISL, and then I told them I would be going to Ottawa this month. Well, they organized a Women and Free Software Day in Montreal, next 24th. I really liked the press release, in which they say being planning to start a PSL Mulheres like group in Montreal.

That would be really, really great!

*Women and Free Software*

On Sunday July 24th 2005, Fernanda Weiden will be of passage in Montreal to open a meeting on the topic of “Women and Free Software”. The event will be organized by FACIL, pour l’appropriation collective de l’informatique libre, the Koumbit network, the Laboratoire de Communication Médiatisée par Ordinateur (LabCMO) and Communautique.

The coming of Fernanda Weiden, activist within the Free Software community in Brazil since 2002, has inspired the topic of this conference. Involved in organizing the first women and free software meeting of Brazil in 2003, she has since founded “Projeto Software Livre-Mulheres”, a project having the objective to work along organizations of women in order to debate their needs and their participation in the domain of information and communication technologies (ICT) and particularly of free software. Her contribution falls under a process of social integration in the field of free software in Brazil. Her participation in the Debian project (GNU/Linux distribution) and in the “Free Software Foundation of Latin America” will open the meeting on her experience in Latin America.

This event is actually the first step of a medium term objective to create a “Women and Free Software” collective in Montreal. This will be an occasion to gather the people of Quebec interested to participate in its creation. During the presentation, the participants will have the opportunity to determine the stakes of free software through these topics: women and the development of free software, women and the access to training for ICT, social and digital integration, participative uses (network citizens and solidarity) and appropriation models of free software, concerns of the social environment and paradigms of local development. The presentation will be followed by a roundtable where our guests invested in different domains (development, education and IT in Quebec) will share their experience. There will also be a discussion and presentation of books and documents about free software.

The “Women and Free Software” day will be held on Sunday July 24th 2005, between 12h and 16h. The meeting will take place at the Café Utopik, 552 Sainte-Catherine East near Berri-UQAM metro. For more information, please visit the website of the event:

http://femmes.informatiquelibre.info

This event will be also the occasion to discuss the workshops and presentations for the SQIL, Semaine Québécoise de l’Informatique Libre, which will be held between November 12th and 20th 2005:

http://sqil.info

Lia Talbot: 514-948-6644 #227 – lia@communautique.qc.ca; Valérie Dagrain: 450-646-7522 – vdagrain@free.fr

Finally I’m back home after 25 days in Germany. No words to say how cool was my trip.

I would like to thanks all the FSFE people for being so cool with me during LinuxTag. I really hope that FSFLA will have a really united team as you have. Well, we are working for it…

Also, my time in Hamburg was really, really great. The Hamburg’s channels were really great, 200Km/h in the Autobanh by motorcycle also cool.

I really enjoyed each of all the minutes I spent there.

Europe is just like we see in movies here. Everything is so organized that made me feel looking to a picture, or watching a movie. And clean! Well…excluding the ice cream guy caring the waffer without protection in the hands and caring the money with the same hand (bleh!).

Besides, here in Brazil…Ministers being changed, Paulista Ave completly destroyed after a football game last week (and the team won the competition), workers party having their directors changed. I don’t need to talk about traffic jam and polution, do I?

I really hope to have the opportunity to move to Recife, Salvador or any other city where the sea would make me forget about the problems around 🙂

Now, time to organize the stuff to get the flight to Ottawa tomorrow. Next adventure: Ottawa Linux Symposium.

Just putted my GNU/Linuxtag’s pictures in a web album….enjoy!

nanda’s pictures

The funniest thing after a Free Software Meeting are the pictures…Bea just sent me her GNU/LinuxTag’s pictures.

Well…i have to say that I’m still wondering why Fede was looking so sad when Georg(aka “The Colonialist”) was talking about the FSF’s network…

More URLs comming soon…

I gave my talk at GNU/LinuxTag yesterday, and i think it was really good. I cannot say that my english was good also, but well…it’s getting better…

I met some women who are working in the GNU/LinuxTag organization and also another women who works for the Green Party in Germany on gender issues and Free Software. One of the things that impressed me was about the few number of women participating in this meeting. I was really expecting to find more than in Brazil, once Germany is “first” world, and Brazil is the 51st in the UN Rancking on Gender GAP.

Well….today I’m catching up the e-mails that i didn’t had the opportunity to read since I started to organize my trip to here. I got upset when I read one e-mail in the Debian Women mailing list with the subject: “Death To women’s Rights (I am an male free software developer and I despise women’s rights and your group).”

Sometimes people ask me why do the feminist groups exists in the Free Software Community. I’ll start to point some URLs to mailing list archives, to answer these questions with some facts….

I’ll try to contact Nils today and talk about the possibility to have a Women and FS focused meeting next year along with GNU/LinuxTag. I think it would be really interesting and also the only way to really get more women involved in Free Software events in Europe.

I’m really glad to know that my plan of attending for LinuxTag worked out, and now I’m just organizing the things around here for this long trip.

It will be my first time in Europe, and I’m really excited to know that I’ll meet lots of friends there: Leon, Mako, Georg, Meike, Dalibor, Fede, Bea…that will make me feel less “out of place”…

I’ll give a talk at LinuxTag with the same name than my blog here: Free Software with a Female touch, in which I’ll talk about women’s participation in technologies and in Free Software community, explaining a little deeply about two projects in which I’m working today: PSL Mulheres and Debian Women.

After LinuxTag, I’ll finally meet the guys of LTC Germany, group that is working together with LTC Brazil in some projects.

Sure, I’m planning to bring some cachaça, once I could be in risk of being deported back to Brazil if I came in Karlsruhe without any bottle 🙂

Also, we’ll have some FSFLA t-shirts available to sell.

Let’s see if the people around there can have good parties for nerds like we have in our events here in Brazil 🙂

A few months ago, a group of people gathered with the intention of planning the structure and setting the goals of the future Free Software Foundation Latinoamérica (FSFLA), an organization meant to become a sister to the United States of America’s Free Software Foundation (FSF), Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and Free Software Foundation India (FSFI).

We started our discussions in november 2004, in light of the fact that Free Software’s worldwide growing popularity and widespread use raises the need for a network of FSFs working in a coordinated fashion, upholding and strengthening Free Software’s philosophy, legal framework and ideals, in consonance with the FSF’s definition (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html).

Free Software Foundation Latinoamérica will become yet another actor in strengthening this international FSF network.

Free Software Foundation Latinoamérica’s main goal will be to act together with the rest of the FSFs in the promotion and defense of Free Software, as well as to help guide and influence policies which concern, have an effect on or are affected by Free Software.

We are leading our discussions together with the presidents of both FSF and FSFE, Richard M. Stallman and Georg Greve, as a means of keeping Free Software Foundation Latinoamérica in close touch with its peers from its inception.

To be a sister organization means to practice the same values and philosophy, as well as to share objectives. The coordinated work with our sisters is a key ingredient to avoid divisiveness within our movement.

So far, our core team is composed by the following people:

Beatriz Busaniche – bea@vialibre.org.ar Enrique Chaparro – echaparro@uolsinectis.com.ar Federico Heinz – fheinz@vialibre.org.ar Fernanda G Weiden – fernanda@softwarelivre.org JuanJo Ciarlante – jjo@mendoza.gov.ar Mario Bonilla – miope@miope.org

We are making slow but steady progress to strengthen our network of collaborators, with the conviction that we must pay special attention to the maturity, integrity and solidity of our team.

At this point, we are drafting the specific goals of the organization, as well as the political foundations of its structure, which will certainly parallel our sister organizations’ lines of work.

If you wish to come in contact with us, please do so by e-mail at info@fsfla.org.

If you wish to be informed of our progress in the creation of the organization, you can do so through fsfla-anuncio@fsfeurope.org .

Next weekend, FLISOL (Festival Latino Americano de Instalação de Software Livre) will be held in more than 100 cities in Latin America, to promote using and increase the awareness about Free Software.

It’s an traditional Install Fest, in which people bring their machines to be freed and also in some places the local coordinators are organizing talks on Free Software.

I’m the general coordinator here in Brazil, and are being a really interesting experience try to manage a so big initiative, with 30 cities officially involved here, and a team with around 200 volunteers.

In the lasts days I’m receiving lots of e-mails from the local coordinators like a final check to a big battle. A freedom battle! I’m really enjoying organizing that. Unfortunatelly, in the last time i was not working how much I was wanting to do for the festival. But I’m trying to do my best in this final lap.

During the FLISOL, I’ll be in a city called Ourinhos, giving a talk on “Challenges of Free Software Community in Brazil”. It’s about what we need to do to become developers. Today there are some small teams of developers working as slaves in project like Gnome Localization and others. Specially the Gnome Localization team have less than 10 people working hard on Gnome translation to Brazilian Portuguese (more than 30 thousand strings to translate). It’s to much work for a so small team. Also, we have only 13 active Debian Developers, in a group with around 500 people active in the Debian Brasil user group.

What I want to share with the people is the needing to become developers, cause I believe only people who work developing technologies can help to put the technology working for themselves. If we continue being only users, the technologigal scenary to Latin America and Brazil in special would be almost the same than today. Customers of a free technology, but still customers. We need to be more active participating on the technologies development.

Brazil is knowed as the “Free Software Island” around the world, but the good tech people here needs to be more hackers. They need to share knowledge and also put their knowledge to serve the whole community. We already know how to use Free Software, we need to learn how to be active and share the deep knoledge we gained during this long time using it.

Let’s start to show some code too!