FLISOL and Flor de Ceibo
Last Saturday, I went to a free software convention called FLISOL, held downtown in a gorgeous old building that I thought might be a museum, but turned out to be a public high school. These events are held all over Latin America, and are intended to introduce people to the world of free software and allow current users to meet and learn from each other. There seemed to be a wide range of people attending, i.e. not just programmers and students. ceibalJAM! had a table with some XOs set up for people to play with, where people could learn about different projects. All the software ceibalJAM! works with is free software. This means that it is free to use and distribute, which is important because we want to distribute it to students without requiring schools to spend a lot on software. However, it also means that the code is freely available so that others can learn from it and reuse it, which increases the quantity and quality of software produced overall. There were a variety of other free software-related organizations there as well–openOffice, Mozilla, etc. Different groups gave speeches throughout the day. My friend Ismael told me that Linux is a hard sell in Uruguay in part because most operating systems are pirated versions of Windows, so are already free. Hence the slogan here: “Free software is a question of liberty, not price”–the idea is that even if you don’t pay to use Windows, you’re still contributing to its dominance.
A short video about the event is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=219hWnCJ00A
On Monday, I had my first meetings with the groups from Flor de Ceibo that I’ll be working with. The first group, which will be working in rural areas, is almost all girls, many of whom are studying education or psychology. The second group is more mixed and has many engineering students. It’s hard for me to understand long talks in Spanish, so I hope I’m not missing crucial information. In the evening, there was a larger event for all of the Flor de Ceibo groups, and several people gave talks about how Flor de Ceibo has evolved, its importance to society, and the sorts of problems facing Plan Ceibal. For example, one goal is for the laptops to be a resource for parents as well, so they discussed reasons parents weren’t using the computer–some don’t know how, some are afraid of breaking it, some thought it was just for kids, etc. There are more meetings this week, and next weekend I’m going to visit a school in Rivera with the second group.
