Free Software with a Female touch
Latin America united by Free Software
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!