Saturday, December 12, 2015

2015 events, training Free Software in Panama

First of all, sorry my last post was about Flisol 2015 in Panamá, while many things had happen since then, many words and thoughts  never become a post. Therefore here we go.

Flisol was nice event, thanks to Universidad del Itsmo to host the event, but was the first one I missed on the last five years, was travelling,  visit Ecuador on Family matters, while there manage to talk with some Fedora people there, it was not face to face as  wanted but at lease can confirm we have some users and community members. In a way they do not participate to much out side Ecuador and while we try to change that it seems it will not happen. Some how we need to work on a way to reach them and start working with them to grow the community there.

With that in mind there are other countries in Latam which has some community members but nothing is done in them out side a talk Flisol and not sure if they talk about Fedora. Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala for instance are countries where Fedora latam has Ambassadors but cero activity other than Flisol. Which remain me there is a lot of work to do on our region but resources are basically used to support local activity on countries that have activity. Since cross border travel is expensive that is a limitation for us to visit and start developing a community there.

Latam community has grow in general with more Ambassadors and with a bit more enrolment in other parts of the project, how ever there is to much to do, to find more people that will enjoy been part of Fedora on others areas than Ambassadors.

Let go back to Panama, our group has grow in members some of them still in our training face and hope will join other groups within Fedora soon, we have five local students learning Python and other skills to join infrastructure and other groups it is a slow process but Potty is the may lead on this project.

But that was not all, we had been working with people from San Miguelito Town Hall,  small district embed in Panama City, they wanted to implement free software on this poor town, which then had less that 20 pc to manage all their task. So we help their IT department by training them on Linux as workstation and servers, plus  Libre Office training which was done by Monica Mora from Floss-pa. While it was on really complicated conditions it paid of San Miguelito runs over 100 pc with Fedora and free software. The real hero there is the IT team, that sacrifice after ours to be train by me on Linux while they were trained on Fedora and Linux Mint as they were not make their mind about what distro to use, at the end they choose Fedora. So make me happy.

San Miguelto, IT team deserve my congratulations as that was not easy task to do, teach people how to use a Linux (some workers there never used a pc before others only new Windows) , they have face many challenges on this implementation but they had manage it with really little  trouble. While there are many things to do there there time and mine is been complicated to help them more, but if they keep that way they will do great work.

San Miguelito require more free software as some government software only runs on Windows, but they manage to have the minimal amount possible of Windows PC, saving money from licenses. While this is the first case of massive use of free software in Panama, it is in the right direction.

Floss-pa with Kiara Navarro, team up with Panama City Hall to train kits on Robotics they did 3 courses of 4 Saturdays each on municipal libraries to 8 to 14 years olds kits, they enjoy learning and working with arduino and Fedora to code them. This was posible thanks to Monica Mora and Alexis Heiva from Floss-pa.



Other eventos as Software Freedom Day hosted by Universidad Interamericana de Panama were organize by the new members of Panama team, tutor by experience ones.

Fedora 22 Release Party was hoste by Universidad Tecnologica de Panama organized by Luis Manuel Segundo




At the end of this year Gonzalo Nina from Fedora Bolivia, spend some time in Panama working, but as a good Fedorian we ask him if he could talk about his expertice Security and Fedora Security Spin on two universities, and he was happy to do so. Thanks Gonzalo.


Last night we meet and enjoy our last Floss-pa and Fedora meeting of the year.

Last thing to say is it was great year many work done too much still to do, many thanks to all Fedora Panama team. Floss-pa members.