Free Software with a Female touch
Women and Free Software….
June 24th, 2005
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.
Next trip — Karlsruhe/Germany
June 13th, 2005
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 🙂
Declaration of Intent – Free Software Foundation Latinoamérica
April 17th, 2005
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 .
Latin America united by Free Software
March 28th, 2005
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!
Saturday night…
March 27th, 2005
After spend hours trying to understand why the xml2po manpage was appearing blank, I found the error… It’s really interesting how I can solve bugs on packages after some hours hacking, and at the same time, I’m not able to solve MY bugs…btw…why am I at home in a saturday at night? Package maintainer needed for nanda package.
Still trying to understand how to use Plone
March 27th, 2005
It’s the second time I’m spending hours trying to understand how to put my blog working fine on this website…
Maybe I’ll never understand completly, maybe it’s working well and I’m trying to complicate a simple thing…who knows?
Today I had a good talk to clarify a GPL exception in two files of gnome-doc-utils with the upstream author. Now the COPYING file looks better, and I hope the people will not ask me anymore about the weird GPL exception.