Thiago Sá

Last Saturday, we had the FLISOL (Free Software Installation Latin American Festival) in Fortaleza, Brazil. The event had cultural presentations, a digital culture forum, seminars and an Install Fest that last the entire day with the essential help of one of the biggest Linux communities in our state, TuX-CE, among many other activities.

In my opinion, the biggest difference between FLISOL in Fortaleza and others events was the place in which the event took place. Instead of choosing an university or a big research or business center to be the event location, our FLISOL took place at Casa Brasil. For those who doesn't know what Casa Brasil is, it's a project of the brazilian government that aims to provide technology, connectivity, art, culture and entertainment to areas with low HDI. In order to know this project better, click here (in Portuguese).

Due to the location of the event, we had a very different public from which we are used to. Many children and teenagers were present at the presentations and seminars and (in most of the cases) they had their first experience at a technology event. We even had a public school excursion that took about 50 students to the event. Besides that, we also had many older participants from the local community that were equally amazed by everything that was being shown. It was really insteresting and rewarding observing them passionately participating, making very interesting questions and discovering new things every moment.

As for the participation of Sun in the event, we had Silveira (Tech Lead of the Campus Ambassadors Program) as one of the major articulators and organizers of the event. He also participated in a seminar about free robotics demonstrating his BumbaBot and some SunSPOTs.

I did a tech demo about OpenSolaris with the duration of about 1 hour and distributed several minibooks and DVDs for all the participants. We also spent all day raffling lots of giveaways from Sun.

Here are the photos I took from the event. Sadly, the ones of my tech demo, specifically, were took from a cell phone (thus, the low quality):

FLISOL in Fortaleza has absolutely overcome all our expectations. We took technology and information to people who barely have access to it, and doing that has given us many pleasant surprises. We showed that technology is something that interests everyone, no matter how old or what social class one belongs. We also learned that having that specific "technology public" is not essential for having a successful event. Others like this will come for sure.

Cheers everyone and until next time!