North by South is pleased to inform that a member of our team Isabela Fernandes was invited to lead the Medical Project in Brazil. Medical is a GPL Hospital Information System created by the GNU Solidario project. North by South News wrote about Medical in 2009, at the time, with only one year of existence, they were finalists for the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards at the category ‘Best Government Software‘.

Medical is being used at clinics in the rural area from the north of Argentina and at the Peerless Hospital in Nigeria. They are also at the Public Software Portal from Brazil federal government and soon with Isabela help will be full translated to Brazilian Portuguese and ready to be used by clinics, hospitals in Brazil.

Check out the new release launched on June 6th, Medical 0.0.50.

Below the annoucement from Luis Falcón creator of Medical:

Dear Friends,

I am pleased to announce that Isabela Fernandes is the new leader of the Medical project in Brazil. I met Isabela in Berkeley last year and since then we have been in contact working with the dissemination of free software. She is a member of the GNU Solidarity and have helped me, along with Cesar Brod and Corinto Meffe, in the dissemination of Medical in Brazil.

Isabela has worked more than 10 years as an advocate of free software in different sectors, from her company North by South in San Franciscon as well as from the IT sector of the Presidency of Brazil. She is a person who has been involved with social welfare organizations, working at GESAC, a digital inclusion project from the Ministry of Communications of Brazil and at projects of inclusion of women in the FOSS world.

She has always been in contact with the health sector, accompaning closely the proplems experienced by the Brazilian population. She is the daughter of a surgeon-dentist and a dental prosthesis, and she has studied Master Dental Technitianat the University of Alfenas, in Minas Gerais, Brazil. When she met Medical, she knew immediately the importance of the project in the health care sector, as in Brazil, where a federal government policy to use free software has generated significant progress in various sectors and institutions of the government.

Isabela believes that a project such as Medical will be the key to improve the public health care system in Brazil, as well as managing budgets in this sector. There is why she didn’t hesitate to accept the invitation from my part to be the leader of Medical project in Brazil.

From my side and from the Medical team and GNU Solidario she has our full support and I am sure that her management will be entirely successful.

Luis Falcón
http://gnusolidario.org

We have reported extensively about the Venezuelan government’s support of open formats in the area of information technology. But it was only recently that the National Center of IT (CNTI) made it mandatory for the public sector to use open formats (ODT, ODS, ODP, ODG). This requirement was published in Venezuela’s Official Journal, giving it more formality since it was distributed to the public and made official. The articles describing the new Technical Standards for the government can be read in Spanish - here and here.

In a special note for North by South News, CNTI describes the process to create such standards (also available to NXS readers in Spanish) and the extent to which they ensured that what was going to become mandatory was a consensus that came from the base or, as they described it, Venezuela’s “Technological Ecosystem (companies, cooperatives, academics, Free Software communities, officials, users etc)”. CNTI also gave us an update about how the migration process is going in the country.

NXS is honored to be in contact with Venezuela and happy to be following and reporting on the progress inside of Latin America governments who are adopting free software, open standards and concepts of open knowledge. NXS is not only committed to making information about this progress available to the English-speaking world but our Developers Network includes dedicated free software activists who are taking part in this regional technological revolution. Every time a milestone like this one is met, the evidence of free software as a better way becomes proven out in real world scenarios.

North-by-South is proud to announce the first in a series of articles that will document the Latin American free software movement in detail. We recently spoke with Marcos Mazoni, who made news last month when he was appointed as the new head of the federal Technical Committee for the Implementation of Free Software in Brazil. The interview mostly focuses on the efforts to migrate Brazil’s state-owned IT firms to open source software, as this is what Mr Mazoni has been working on for the past decade or so. Our next article in the series will look at Brazil’s Digital Inclusion program in greater detail. To read the interview with Mr Mazoni:

• Read the interview with Marcos Mazoni in English
• Read the interview with Marcos Mazoni in Portuguese