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