Yesterday was the Latin-american free software intallfest, nearly 300 locations experience a lot of installations on new distributions, desktops, applications and such. I had the task of taking care of my local event. I did received a lot of help from the other members of my tech group. This group really strive making everything looked professional enough and have enough activities.
The event took some partnership, including the venue, the people around, and other things like coffee break and cake.
The event got their target market when a family came to the event and was able to learn about open source software, how it works and how to interact with the online communities around it. In a very sci-fi fashion, a talk that mimic the popular “The hitchhicker’s guide to the galaxy”. The talk focus on loosing the fear of people of interacting with a global and technical communities that work around these open source software.
It goes into making an analogy to traveling through space and visiting colonies in far away lands and how we need to be brave enough to make an effort into interacting with them. That said, I also point out the benefits such as – the applications will forever be available to you, and your workflow and productivity will increase by magnitudes.
The second talk was full of geekiness, teaching how open hardware works and what kind of things you can do with Arduino. One of the flagship projects of the open hardware movement. By making projects such as an alarm for embedded devices, Android is able to compete on what programming for embedded applications and portable devices.
The third conference was about Blender, and what this college been working on several animation projects. They go from the basics of 3D modeling, to dividing projects into departments like lightning, coloring, modeling, animating and coming into a full motion production.
The event was more than conferences, it was about socializing, and getting close to understanding open source. We installed portable applications, education applications, enterprise systems and of course games.
But more than that, it was about checking out how can you be part of the free software movement. How can you contribute to it, and why you should know is a good idea for your personal and professional development. How the world is changing and technology is innovating thanks to free software, and the impact in the personal life of its users is undeniable.
The best part was the non scheduled discussions that took place about education, politics, government and how technology could easily change that. How students should learn with technology as opposed to digitize their old ways of learning. In true TQVCancun fashion, we jump from topic to topic and enhancing the dialog on different parts of the event, from the auditorium to the workshop.
After the event, there was a lot of positive response from the people that attended the event as well as people that want to do more with this. Including launching programs on teaching free software, creating new project and expanding the vision of innovation.
Hopefully our little tech group will get the chance to grow and become more popular and drive more initiatives.
Ideas, thoughts and Free Software 