The San Francisco Community Colo celebrated its one year anniversary of the opening of their cabinets at their facility at 6th and Brannan in downtown San Francisco. Since there are also volunteers who do remote sysadmin work for SFCCP in Sao Paulo, Brazil, they held a simultaneous party there and the two parties were linked in all kinds of ways… audio, video, IRC. The whole event was super-geeky. And it was a lot of fun. So, there is a full debriefing of the party and there are pictures on the SFCCP Flickr account.

All the reasons we think near-shoring to Latin America is a great idea is suddenly starting to dawn on corporations in the United States. Shorter time differences, better English speakers, the Latin American free software movement producing masses of quality programmers — all of this and more is what led us to turn our 10-year-old open source relationships with Latin America into a business that internet companies could tap into. If you want to be ahead of the game, then take notice of these ideas now spreading throughout business-oriented blogs:

Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Brazil all have growing pools of IT talent. Neoris, the Miami-based IT consulting firm, is taking advantage of Latin America, noting the quality of talent is high, turn over is far less than in India, and Monterrey, Mexico, for example, is only an hour’s flight from Dallas. And many Latin American engineers speak better English than we do.

The San Francisco Community Colo, where our servers are co-located, has launched a new website based on Trac, an open source project management application that was written for free software projects. SFCCP demonstrates how open source programming techniques are being applied to real-life organizations. One noteworthy innovation is that everything happening within SFCCP is transparent — keeping track of what people are doing and why they’re doing it is inherent to the software. Wouldn’t it be amazing if this level of insight was available for, say, your local monopoly electricity company? Or your city government? It’s possible that free software can bring a revolutionary change in what expectations the public has for services they pay for and especially for organizations that are supposed to represent us.

San Francisco CCP has made it easy for people to become a supporting member online with their credit card, PayPal, etc. You can become a member even for just $10 a month. northxsouth is very proud to support community networks like SFCCP and we urge everybody to do whatever they can to increase the SFCCP membership. If you believe in old school internet values of openness, democratic expression, freedom of speech and non-commercialism, they have an online sign-up page so you can become a member right now :)

We will be at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit today! Hope to see you there.