So my time in VH was well spent through diferent things including hanging out with a friend from Cancun that was visiting my hometown. So I was in charge of being his tour guide, and was able to check out the city and also realize how much it has changed throught he last year. I was well surprised seen some new things going on in the city but also a bit let down by the many issues that the many problems that the city has been a victim off, including the danger of being flooded once again by the river. 

An event was done during this week which included the tours of many developers from different parts of the country and the US. We were able to party and also chat with many developers about code and open source. Most of the guests were portraid around entrepreneurship for this event, but once we start talking many of the american guys were al about the code including ex-developers from Gnome and other FLOSS projects. 

Most guys were very well rounded Unix guys that knew about code, business developments and enterprising new events. However some clear gaps happened between the american and the Mexican ones, and like one of my rants was the lack of addressing some of the more structural things that need to happen to put startups afloat. 

I didnt attend many of the meetings because I wasnt able to assist during the morning, but some I attended virtually through the livestream channel. With talks from people from Microsoft and some twitstars that were widely critisized. I was able to attend a panel which was extremiley boring and somewhat weak. 

Another lack of mention was the absense of code discussions, not just languages but also technologies and oportunities from these technologies for new markets. I would have like to see more code and howto discussion on how to create the apps and bring the ideas to a functional stance. 

Of course there was many good things as well, the community seems to be more efficient as they work together and also bring more people into this movement. There was a good coordination of multiple activities including the hackspedition, the super happy dev house, a project evaluation and idea workshops. 

Also hanging out with some old friends as well as new was very enjoyable and also be able to see them as an evolution from years before. Some new ones including Dennis and John from the US were great party buddies and help to add more adventurous spirit to the evenings. 

A couple of weeks ago we celebrated the Software Freedom Day in Cancun, the first SFD in that city. The development of the event was quite nice since we were able to capture most of the moments of the event and include things that have become a signature of the events from Tequila Valley Cancun including the "Freedom Cake" and some gifts to give out after each talk.

The event was well promoted and included things like TV broadcast of the event, development of new web application and even some streaming. 

Talks included new bleeding edge topics like Bitcoins, Git, and some more traditional topics like Creative commons and recomended books on cyberculture and hacker culture.

• Facebook album

The idea of this event is step away from the traditional Linux OS and their application environment and learning more about the ideals that make software free. The opportunities and empowerement behind open technology and also inspire atendees to innovate.

Storify from "SFDCancun"

This was my talk on BitCoin, Ripple and P2P Banking under the Digital Economy conference. You can get the slides here.

And yes we got cake...

During Campus party there was a great panel about the participation campaign with the government on topics such as governance, transparency, and the digital advocacy prepared with #InternetNecesario and #OpenACTA. As well as raising awareness with other important challenges which the community needs to work together to raise the issue to a national platform.

Things like the regulation of bandwith in the national telecomunication industry. With isssues such as why TELMEX, the telecomunication monopoly can't really offer high bandwiths as opposed to other countries.

How part time ignorance and part time corruption from the regulatory parts have a very permisive ruling upon the regulation of information across the nation and trasparency still a far cry as well as huge ignorance around internet surveilance mechanisms.

In the upcoming #SoftwareFreedomDay also come as a great timing in which many issues are arising across the internet. Where talks such as the globalvoices unveils evidence of hard internet surveilance in Egypt during the revolution. Where France president Sarkozy made declarations about "Government being the only legitimate representative of the will of the people" during the #EG8 a few months back. Which put things in perspective after also thinking that government have a monopoly on violence since they hold the army.

Culturaly speaking the Mexican state of affairs has a very tamed society where they look up for the government to take care of them. A very contrarian culture compared to the liberal American society where they inheritely don't trust the government. Besides that, is real that there are already movements like Wikileaks, LULSec and Anonymous which start doing digital protesting and whisle blowing.

The important point here is that the only REAL strangehold on government will come from an economic protest. So when digital protest and economic conspiracies match we would start seen a new level of forcing the government to act upon the will of the people.

But going back to the talk in Campus Party, @javierlivas took a somewhat extreme position on overthrow the current state of the government. Not just the president and legislators but current idea of how to handle democracy. An interesting point he mention a few times was that the organization for the current event was larger than the current effort to run the country. Which means that with the total ammount of people in the event would be more than enough to build this new government.

Unfortunately beside the ranting there wasn't a clear proposal. But the idea of digital governments are nonetheless being worked upon. Digital governments are being structured at least by lasindias.coop which talk about this phyle societies that self govern and are economically sustainable to build a more participatory model of governing as opposed to the distributed model derived from old analog systems. Real proposals on how to build the new digital patriotism for a group that breath and live on the web is an idea that usually has been suggested with the Internet map and "if Facebook was a country" analogies.

But having a real Internet state,with means of earning a living through independent economic systems like BitCoins and embracing a new nationality that give you access to benefits such as education, professional advice as well as maybe other benefits could start becoming something that people might start considering. Unfortunately challenges such as the movement of non-digital assets such as servers, electricity and access might present issues to believe this offering.

I usually remember the talk that I got in high school when our teacher describe to us the system which the mormon religion works. Where the religious tax also give benefits to their followers and the church really acts as a more effcient cooperative system to expand economically.

The talk covered also the other view of participating with the government in this change on a gradual pace. But we still haven't focus on enough social capital to make a movement at any level. Whenever is transformational or to enforce a gradual change, I think we got many things to work before we can make such changes.

As Software Freedom Day approaches things like own cloud and just ensuring our digital sovereignty will be at the center piece of the event. And topics like this one could become something important for thinking about and considering.

So tomorrow I am leaving to ENLI and this morning I wake up to a terrible news that one of the oooES contributors got robbed at his place. The news came as a shock and of course I was inmediately concerned that his laptop got lost. So inmediately I wired him some money to get his laptop replaced. In the end I got to talk to him and even though he lost some data, fortunately he had some backups. As I was thinking about this I was also updating my backups.

I spend some minutes on the #Mandriva IRC chatroom since it allows to clarify the options when performing rsync:

rsync -avz ~ /path/to/destination/

and

rsync -avz --delete ~ /path/to/destination/

to keep my files update and delete the files that are not available or are obsolete. I was recomended an O'Reily tutotrial.

In all case, I think that I should remind people to backup and maybe I should start thinking on having web backups. Not just the 2GB dropbox but significally creating a mirror on the web. Unforutnately that would take me mantain a 1TB web disk. Not that I need to backup my movies and music but still.

So back to the ENLI topic, I need to start making the lougage and prepare for the trip. Fortunately the hours are confortable and I think I can be there in no time. So I hope that things work out well. The presentation is surely changing and I think the end result would be satisfactory to the listeners. Just hope to have a good ammount of images.

The video is finally done with some extra clips and a good week in Starbucks primarily were enough to finalize the video full with a custom mix of a remix from the Free software Song and the narrations of one of the most well recognized developers from the FLOSS scene. The end result is this great video which I think will grab the attention of people all around.

Seems that more and more we are leaving the old formats and going into other things like special places and parties. Now it was the Twit&Pizza event in a Bufete Pizza restaurant in a pretty good restaurant. The restaurant was full and we call forward for a 10 member table. We were lucky since we got 11 people showing up and everyone got the chance to chitchat and laugh about the many jokes that this group has. From a funny laugh to also commenting on the slow service (which speed up eventually). We got an odd table where the wifi didn’t quite reach the other side of the table and I wasn’t able to get online althought the other side could.

We also have a good time enjoying the birthday from the table next to us which did some dancing and stuff, the only annoyance was the loud music made it impossible to talk and we need to switch cellphones to basically pass messages around in order to communicate. All in all was a good idea and we enjoyed the food. I personally liked the “sweet pizzas” which I was curious to know how they taste like.

We talked about our ongoing projects, the news from TQV webmaster about pushing the shows on to his site and also having our own terrestial radio show in the local news outlet. Eventually it was fun and we had a good time, I would love to see an event like this happening, I started thinking about going bowling and doing a Twitt&Bowl so we can actually do more than just chit chat around food. Hope this turns out like a good thing in the future.