The 10th edition of the Free Software International Forum (FISL), the biggest event of free software in Latin America and maybe one of the biggest in the world, starts today in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

North by South has been invited to speak at the mega-conference, and we will host a panel about our unique business model, on Saturday, 06/27. We will also be hanging out with the developers of our network and meeting people we work with online everyday and enjoying this very special edition of FISL.

Just a few weeks before the event, the portal SoftwareLivre.org launched a new version of their site with a new software, a social network free software system developed with Ruby by our friends from COLIVRE, a free software coop. The name of it is noosfero and it would be great if every country could use such a tool to get all LUGs together, closer. Another cool tool is @FISL, developed by Vida Nerd (Nerd’s Life). They decided to create this tool “just because they love the event.” Vida Nerd is a platform where the user can login via a Twitter account and see which panels friends are attending or what they have planned to do and which panels have more people attending so you can see the most popular ones.

FISL10 will have over 7,000 participants, including the President of Brazil, Lula da Silva! NXS will be posting photos, a translation of Lula’s comments at FISL and more information on the morning of Saturday, the last official day of the conference.