Posts Tagged with “Latin America”

I will be heading back to Brazil very shortly. From April 14 to 16 I will be in Rio de Janeiro to participate in the World Economic Forum on Latin America, and after that I will head to São Paulo to connect with our Latin American community.

On April 17 I’ll be visiting a LAN house with Bruno Magrani, who works with our Portuguese-speaking community, as well as Guillermo Movia, who works with our Spanish-speaking community members. April 18 will be devoted to a day-long meeting with Mozilla’s Latin American community leaders on the general direction of the Mozilla Project in Latin America, the individual projects people have been working on, and probably some strategizing for FISL. I’m  looking forward to these discussions immensely and to catching up again with some of the folks I met last year.

I’m also very interested to meet new contributors to Mozilla and those interested in creating an open, participatory web whether or not Mozilla has been your focus.  If you are interested in attending this meeting in São Paolo, please contact Bruno (bmagrani at mozilla dot com) or Alix Franquet (alix at mozilla dot com).

I see from Guillermo that the discussion of 2010 goals among the Spanish speaking Latin American community kicks off this week. And I know Marcio is back from vacation and getting ready to start discussions in Brasil. I’m very eager to see this develop, and start to build communities of people accustomed to — and who expect to be — talking about our goals and how to get there.

Mozilla will be participating in the Fórum Internacional Software Livre (FISL) this April, which is exciting both for Mozilla and for me personally. FISL is a non-governmental organization that promotes the adoption, distribution and contribution of free software. This is the 9th year of the forum– hence FISL 9.0 as they put it on their site– and will be held in Porto Alegre. Over 5000 participants from a variety of backgrounds– end users, contributors, professionals, government officials, and corporate partners– will gather to meet and share ideas.

This will be my first trip to Brazil, but it is only one in a growing series of interactions between the Mozilla Foundation and free software / open source participants in Brazil. JT Batson and Asa each wrote about their trip last year, which made it very clear to us that Brazil has very high enthusiasm for free and open source software. There are also some fascinating experiments going on in Brazil today, such as energy self-sufficiency. It’s clear that greater interaction between Brazilian participants and Mozilla could have some very interesting results.

FISL will be a great chance for my Mozilla colleagues and I to learn much more about what’s happening in Brazil and how we might work more closely together. And hopefully, to meet some of the people we’ve heard so much about!

At the same time we’ll be hosting a set of activities. You can find information about Mozilla-specific events on the Mozilla wiki, and Chris Blizzard has posted an annotated schedule of events that is well worth looking at. Mozilla will be hosting a workshop on April 18, and my talk is currently scheduled for the 19th. This should be a very exciting chance to experience the free software and open source community in Brazil first-hand. Now, if only I could find a way to get my family there as well!