Press Release
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For the 9th consecutive year, Free Software activists and developers from the Central American region will meet to share their knowledge and experience
On Friday, July 21st and Saturday, July 22nd 2017, the Universidad de Costa Rica at the city of San José, Costa Rica will host the Ninth Central American Free Software Meetup, which will gather around 200 activists and developers linked to the free software communities in Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and other latin american countries.
The Central American Free Software Meetup (ECSL) is an annual event organized since 2009 by the Free Software Central America community (SLCA). It is a meeting where topics that are of interest to the community, action plans, and positions of the community are proposed, studied and discussed. High-end training on development of free software and hardware are also offered in this event. For this edition, talk, workshop, working group and panel proposals have been received in topics related to digital rights, development of free software and hardware, open data, gender equity and diversity, public policy and experiences on the implementation of free software in education and entrepreneurship.
Registration is still open. This year, the event schedule includes 4 panels, 4 strategic workshops, 8 technical workshops and 20 lectures.
The local team of the IX ECSL has the financial and logistics support of the Universidad de Costa Rica, the audiovisual production support from Universidad Estatal a Distancia and the sponsorship of the Costa Rican companies Gridshield, Solvo and Greencore, and the global company ZeXtras.
More info (in spanish): http://ecsl2017.softwarelibre.ca/
Contact:
Carolina Flores Hine caro(at)piensalibre.net, +506 88303500
Leonardo Jiménez Quijano, leonardo.jimenez(at)ucr.ac.cr, +506 2511-2882
About our allies
The Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR) is the main costa rican university, established in 1940. It has presence in 12 campuses around the country, with more than 40 thousand students. This university uses Free Software since the 1990, but has launched an official migration process on 2011, leaded by its institutional informatics center (Centro de Informática). Today, the migration process is focusing on installing free office suite software and promoting open formats, counting 2500 computers and 47 institutional units officially migrated. This program has established document format standards and has improved technological independence.
The Universidad Estatal a Distancia (UNED) is the only long distance higher education institution in the country and it was established in 1977. It has 37 sites all around the country and this year, is celebrating its 40th anniversary. UNED promotes Free Software in different institutional units and careers, through workshops, classes and projects.
Gridshield is a costa rican engineering and services company. Since 2001, it has been using Free Software to deliver services to other companies and public institutions in Central America for software and IT management implementations. Gridshield is one of the founders of the Free Software Chapter (Capítulo) of the Chamber of Information Technology and Communication (CAMTIC) in Costa Rica. This company has committed to continually contributing with FOSS communities’ events and has released software pieces such as Nagios and an OTRS modules.
Solvo is a costa rican small company established in 2014. Solvo’s team develops web solutions using Free Software exclusively. It’s team contributes with different Django Framework projects and has released and still contributes with some software projects: Academica y Organilab, available at GitHub. One of it’s founders has been a community active member since 2007.
Greencore is a costa rican company established in 2005 with the mission of delivering other companies, GNU/Linux based technologies, through professional support and quality services. Greencore has an educational and training program, including the ones for Linux Foundation and Red Hat certifications. One of its founders is a regular code contributor in different software projects available at GitHub.
ZeXtras (www.zextras.com) is a global company, one of the technological partners of Synacor, owner of Zimbra software, a global leader in open source email, calendaring, and collaboration software. ZeXtras contributes with Zimbra’s source code y and develops its own software, such as: Open ZAL (http://openzal.org). ZeXtras is one of the founders of Zeta Alliance (http://www.zetalliance.org), “an alliance of users, partners, and contributors for the Zimbra Email & Collaboration Platform to help ensure its long term success and health as an open source project”. Greencore is the official partner for ZeXtras.