Brazil is aggressively expanding their Telecentro program, community free software workshops and technology education

The Brazilian National Support Project for Telecentros (public computer labs with free, public Internet access) intends to support the deployment of 2 - 3,000 new Telecentros and towards achieving the goal of 10,000 active Telecentros by the year 2010. Almost all of the Telecentros are built using entirely free and open source software. Adding to the social benefit of the project, the rapid timetable will be met by training Brazilian youths on how to install Linux, configure the workstations and servers, and get the Telecentros online, up and running.

The Project is currently in a period of public comment until May 29th, during which time any citizen will be able to read the project proposal and submit his/her suggestions to it. The first draft of the Project will be presented at a public hearing at SERPRO’s headquarters (Brazil’s IT state company) in Brasília on May 19 (Tuesday). Even more cool, the hearing will be held as a national video-conference with 28 cities in Brazil participating. After the draft is presented, the public will be able to directly interact with the public officials from the Ministries of Communication, Science & Technology and Planning about the project.

Anyone can check out a list of the different Telecentros programs in Brazil, with over 3,000 already deployed throughout the country.

Another upcoming event sponsored by the government is the annual edition of Workshops for Digital Inclusion, a federal government-sponsored training for people who will work at the Telecentro labs. The workshops are also open to anyone from the community interested in learning about technology and free software. Last year, the 7th edition of this event gathered 3,514 people in the city of Belém in Pará, the highest participation to date for that event.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Microsoft continues to bribe politicians into ignoring free software, we have sub-quality public technology education for students, absolutely no technology education available for the community-at-large except what unfunded user groups can provide and what we can boast is a generation of youth who know how to pimp out their MySpace page but probably can’t spell “Unix.”