CONSEGI 2008 is over and North by South was honored and excited to have been a participant in this convergence of public free software initiatives from all over Latin America. We are providing here an English-language update of some of the highlights of what we saw and who we spoke with during CONSEGI.

Between all of the presentations and debates about free software usage and policies within government, one of the most important things that came out of this first annual CONSEGI meeting was the CONSEGI Declaration, signed on the conference’s last day by Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, Cuba, Ecuador and Paraguay. This declaration is a letter of protest against the ISO/IEC’s rejection of the formal appeal from Venezuela, South Africa, Brazil and India of the ISO vote that approved Microsoft’s OOXML as an international standard.

North-by-South was happy to have the opportunity to sit and talk with Marcos Mazoni, head of the Technical Committee to Implement Free Software in Brazil, about the many issues involving free software in Latin America. He confirmed that CONSEGI will continue to happen next year and that plans are already underway for CONSEGI 2009. Talking about the topic of transparency in the government, which was expressed in many of the painels, Mr Mazoni explained that creation of IT policies in Brazil will include consideration of participatory democracy, enabling the average citizen to follow the governmental actions as they affect people’s lives by making these actions transparent to the public. You can read more about our discussion with Mr Mazoni on our CONSEGI 2008 Summary Page as well as issues such as licensing government-sponsored code and reports on free software initiatives in Argentina, South Africa, Ecuador and Venezuela.