[Fsf-friends] Re: III World Social Forum and other musings

[FN]

Taking the liberty of sharing Enrique's letter, which makes a lot of
interesting points, with this list. FN

On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Enrique A. Chaparro wrote:


> Hi, Fred!
> I've just came back from the III World Social Forum, held in Porto
> Alegre, Brazil. The Forum is a response (and a rebuttal :) ) to the
> World Economic Forum, and probably one of the most significant
> political events in the world. This year, 100000+ people attended
> the Forum; there were 20763 representatives of 5717 organizations
> from 156 countries, and 4094 journalist of 1432 media covered the
> event.
> 
> The IT infrastructure of the event was deployed by Procempa (the 
> information services company owned by the Municpality of Porto
> Alegre), based on free software. All the servers, and 80% of the
>  ~750 desktops were based on free software.
> Debian-RS (the Debian users group of the State of Rio Grande do Sul)
> installed and operated ~80 machines at the International Youth Camp
> for the independent/alternative press media.
> The delegates' registration and workshop scheduling systems were 
> based on PHP/MySQL. The three internet centers for public access
> were based on Linux (RH)/Mozilla/Evolution/OpenOffice; OpenOffice
> was also deployed on almost all the desktops (including the few
> Windows ones).
> We (hmmm... how to define `we'? a loosely coupled hacker community
> from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Canada, Italy and Spain...) made
> several workshops one very disparate subjects: from how to manage
> a radio with free software, to the implications for human rights
> of political (WTO - WIPO - DMCA) and technological (TCPA - Palladium)
> measures.
> Unfortunately, we were unable to control the Forum's official
> website ( http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/ ), M$-driven. One
> of the workshops made the full conversion of the site to a free
> platform (Zope), but I guess it was too late.
> The Fourth World Social Forum will probably be held in India in 2004.
> Thus, there are two open challenges for the indian free software
> community: to make the WSF4 fully powered by free software; and to
> increase the awareness of the relationships between software and
> freedoms among the social organizations and the progressive forces
> of the world. So, the challenges are open; now it's up to you :)
> 
> In other news...
> I would like to contact Prof G Nagarajuna, who you told me was 
> working on the field of free software in education. UNESCO is
> organizing an international seminar on free software in education
> in Peru for next June; having a paper from him would be great.
> 
> And more...
> I've been asked to write an article for `Le Monde Diplomatique'
> in Spanish, on the relationships between software and society.
> I will need lots of input, so I will be bothering you soon on
> the issues in India, if you don't mind.
> 
> Warmest regards from the Far South.
> 
> Enrique
> 

-- 
Frederick Noronha    : http://www.bytesforall.org : When we speak of free
Freelance Journalist : Goa India 403511           : software we refer to
Ph 0091.832.409490   : Cell 0 9822 122436         : freedom, not price.