FLISOL event is happening in late April but we are already at full speed recruting, looking for sponsors and promoters and setting up an even better event from last year. 2011 was great for the FLISOL movement in Mexico, and this year I hope it gets even better.

First of, we did a decent job documenting the event, making database of visitors and getting contacts from newspapers and shows. We also got some visibility online and also some recognition, so is a good time to build on a next level of recognition closer to the mainstream.

This year we have a stronger relationship with a few more companies and we are growing. We hope to have even more partners than last year. And I hope we are able to acomplish more on less time. We also have more time with some universities from the locality and potentially a better fit team to create events.

So we are looking for this edition to be bigger, greater and more to the point of what people really are looking for. We are compiling a CD full of Videos that users can take home and maybe even a software packages that explain the creation and use of open source software.

However this is not enough, we are looking for next year also as an opportunity to kick start new developments with budgets and more strong relationship with the different locations across the country. We want to launch an initiative to get federal funds for innovation and put it into next year event across the country, giving it more visibility and a relationship with innovation that can start getting some legs.

I hope we can do this with the help of some of the open source activist that I know through the years. Happy FLISOL and keep hacking and moving.

So this is a new year and I hope that we can get the wheels rolling about FLISOL. This year FLISOL will be happening on the 28 of April which give us room to perform. I hope that FLISOL this year can help me get even more exposure and make it able for everyone to participate.

The event consist on having many more people involved and have a good place to share the knowledge on the topics. But also to have a more long term vision about the project.

Looking forward to 2013 from now is something that I would love to do, and being able to perform a national event with stronger presence will make it much better not just for the event but for open source in the country as a whole.

I think that the communication channels need to get off the internet a bit and more into the mainstream so that more people are able to contribute for real.

This means that more talks about how to contribute would be a good start to get things on a higher level of deployment and awareness.

Hope to have a great celebration this year.

So the last post of the year as I will try to look back on my personal life. My achivements and things that I think are moving for the next year.

• A whole year living in Cancun, nothing like chilling next to a beautiful beach. 
• Flying to New York and watching the Wu-Tang Clan, Nas, Mobb Deep, Immortal technique etc 
• Starting the certification for OpenOffice.org as well as the Internships 
• Building a new tech community in Cancun with Tequilla Valley 
• Becoming the technical lead for OLPC Mexico and country manager for FLISOL and Software Freedom Day 
• Giving some PHD classes on free software

Some goals for new year include:

• Expand the certification project to the rest of the world 
• Moving back to Europe 
• Going to ApacheCon and representing OpenOffice 
• Consolidating a olpc group in sugar development in Cancun 
• Push better quality and development community 
• Finalize the OpenOffice guide and bring it up to par with the english version 
• Give out a course on free software processes and environment for enterprise 
• Follow the NBA and see Lebron James live game

I'll quote and translate this post from Lesthack on his blog. Giving a roundup of what this last months raising awareness of the event and how it evolved up to the day of launch.

On 2011 is the 7th year that the Latinamerican Festival of Free Software installations takes place in Latin America and Spain, and we are proud that the number of locations this year came to a wooping 260. Althought there were some locations that for some reason they couldn't come through, or locations that did had an event but didn't register on the website.

Mexico this year had a great 53 locations documented on the official wiki of FLISOL, surpasing this year to the ones before and waiting on the next years to increment even more.

This year new people were involved in the national chapter for Mexico including Jorge Luis Hernandez (Lesthack), Alexandro Colorado (JZA), Joshua Laister (Nierox) and Enrique Rodriguez (TheKiken), and sometimes it wasn't enough, we started to take action by inviting people to participate more interactively on the mailing list [1] and on the IRC [2].

Between meetings in IRC and Skype, and between some glitches, we could put together a plan with action items like improving the way the coordination was currently running.

We improved the website mainly the one for the Mexican chapter, within the constrain of the MoinMoin wiki and carrying an old version, we were able to improve it giving it more dynamic and graphical interfaces, we classify the information on a better way, to make it more readable and easy to go through.

With the goal to rescue some of the chapter from previous years, we had a direct contact with the local organizers to verify their current situation, sometimes we made a difference.

At the end the range of action could have been expanded however there were other things to consider. The work was made from the National Chapter is mainly a work of love, and with other matters like school and work, there needs to be able to find a hole in a schedule so we can fit in this issues.

We are doing a good job, the 2012 Flisol is still ahead of us, is the time to bring some action, forget the discussions that separate one place from the next and work togethers are embassadors of Free Software.

We still don't know if next year the number of locations will increase not only in Latin america but around the world, we don't know if is possible retake and rebuild the name of FLISOL, what we do know is that we want to let people know about alternatives that are open as well as new proposals and interaction between us.

Thanks to everyone that made FLISOL 2011 possible, also, we welcome the invitation to organize next year event, at FLISOL 2012.

Nice post and I agree with everything he said, we do have some challenges that has to do with the long period of time between events. Here is where some real work needs to be talked about to mantain these locations for next year and also convince them to produce other events beyond FLISOL like the SoftwareFreedomDay.

We also want to handle the network to come up with ideas of building local tours around the city giving talks to audiences that otherwise would be hard to get like, high schools and Jr High from different parts of the city.

Even if FLISOL 2011 already past, it really hasn't, there still a lot of work that we need to evaluate and see if there is things that we are still missing or that we are just simply underperfoming.

Let's try to bring the network more in touch with each other and help build the relationships we need to make this FLOSS community prosper.

I am a geek, techie, hax0r, hipster, otaku, gamer, freaker, lurker, coder? When I talk with my family usually they never know what I am talking about. They can't care less if there was a major fork between OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice or that Nokia had dump the Meego project. Facebook and even Google dont really mean much and the youtube new sensation is as alien to them as some thing that exist but can't be that important.

However this time I am doing an event that is not target to me or the people from my target. The challenge is to get people like me to build an event for people like my parents, all over the country and the rest of the continent.

So one thing is how can we entice the regular non-geeks to a tech event. One thing that we need to understand is that even thought everyone uses technology, most people are bored by it.

They see it as the future, but really they believe themselves about belonging to the past. This feeling is commonly seen on adults but is odd when it comes from kids.

However thsis cause the opposite effect, most kids don't really think about technology as something that require a lot of thought. So they take the technology for granted and feeling a bit old school when thinking about generating such technology.

Sure we all use technology, technology for our phones, our computers, our ATM, at school and even to pay our taxes. However the more you see people embrace technology they are also more turned off by the idea of developing such technology. At the same time, there is a more social context to technology that are making more people trying to get into e-business. Creating your iphone app, your iphone app and your web 2.0. However, where does free software enters into this. A contrarian driver such as freedom and sharing knowledge become less popular as they dont really catch the idea of sharing is good.

This is the flyer we will be posting across town hoping more people can get the chance to stop by, hope you guys enjoy it:

The thought behind this flyer was to encourage a more social and festive image to the whole event. Including women is also something that we want to encourage as this also doesn't really is more of a cultural event more than a technology event.

I hope with this poster more people will be tempted to come to the event and be more involved.

Today the podcast I record with Rockdeveloper was launched, unfortunately is in spanish but hope still useful.

Por fin está listo el podcast del mes de Marzo.

En esta ocasión nos acompañó Alexandro Colorado, un entusiasta promotor del software libre, para platicarnos acerca del FLISOL y su realización en la ciudad de Cancún, lugar donde actualmente radicamos Cesar, Iaax y un servidor, así como el buen JZA (Alexandro) .

Espero les guste esta amena charla de aproximadamente 40 minutos, donde JZA nos comparte su experiencia como colaborador del proyecto OpenOffice.org y su vision de la filosofía del Software Libre.

Aprovechamos este espacio para animar a todos los escuchas a participar en el FLISOL ya sea en Cancun o en donde sea que radiquen (esperemos que se realice un FLISOL en tu ciudad), ya que la colaboración es la materia prima de este movimiento.

Les adjunto los datos de JZA para cualquier información sobre el FLISOL.

JZA
Coordinador Nacional para Mexico del FLISOL
twitter: @flisolmexico
web: http://flisol.info/Mexico

Gracias,  apoyen el movimiento y comenten. Nos vemos en Abril.

 

Download the podcast here:

 

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.

 

This week was interesting, and by that I mean a bit unconfortable. Due to some bitching from my roomates, they decided stand up to the man and not pay the electricity bill, resulting in a 2 day (so far) blackout. Forcing me to report the rest of the week from a Starbucks. Is almost 11pm and soon i will be going back to my dark apartment. I've been here since 11am when I woke up, took a shower and report to my local starbucks for a good 12 hr period.

Sounds nasty? Well actually it has been quite the opposite. I dunno if its the elevator music or what else, but I have been quite productive everytime I come to the Starbucks. Also was expecting my weekly geek meetup which resulted also in good excuse to be here.

In general the day gave me a good period to produce some interesting work dealing with the recording of my first video for FLISOL, the event I am getting involved and pushing for 2 sites, one in Cancun and another in Villahermosa.

So far it looks pretty good. Good email communication, and great inroads fixing the recording,mixing it and finally generating a first draft of the video. Yesterday I did some 3D and have got some other members of the organization to help me out making some animations and provoking good results.

I will be posting the finalized video, so far I can add the original OGG mix.