Last week I attended the 14th edition of the Free Software International Forum (FISL) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. It was a great opportunity to see in real life people I see daily on IRC/mail-lists/social networks.

I live in Pelotas, which is located 270 km far from my state’s capital, Porto Alegre, so I couldn’t miss this rare chance of meeting my fellow gnomers. We had a community meeting where we’ve discussed GNOME activities in Brazil and some directions GNOME has taken over the past few releases. We have also heard a lot of feedback from GNOME users at the community meeting (some related to design decisions, other to distros delivering GNOME software, and etc). It was pretty exciting!

Besides the GNOME related activities, I’ve attended some really nice presentations and discussions on free software and specific technologies. I’d highlight these in particular:

• “Copyfight: muito além do download grátis” [portuguese]: which was a discussion about internet freedom focusing on the book Copyfight (portuguese only). This discussion featured Tobias Anderson (The Pirate Bay co-founder) and the Copyfight book writers.
• “Why conferences matter: Lessons learned from Linux file systems development” by Valerie Aurora.
• “GStreamer SDK” [portuguese] presented by our fellow gnomer Luciana Fujii Pontello.
• “Firefox para Android: Passado, Presente e Futuro” [portuguese]: which was presented by Lucas Rocha (old school gnomer and mozillian).
• “Hacking the academic experience” by Emily Stolfo.
• “A Internet sob ataque… a batalha final é agora” [portuguese]: This discussion was about internet freedom and the current NSA scandals.
• “O primeiro mártir da ciberguerra” [portuguese] (It was a discussion about Aaron Swartz).

See you in FISL 15!