Canaima is a Venezuelan GNU/Linux distribution, promoted and developed with significant government support, and designed to be packaged with applications for administering federal government agencies! Recently, an event called “Cayapa técnica” was held to celebrate and kick off collaboration between the Canaima community and the Venezuelan government’s CNTI (National Center of Information Technology) to improve upon the distribution. Anyone can download the latest i386 release (and there’s also a version for AMD64 architectures).

ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) is an organization designed to foster co-operation amongst Latin American countries and currently includes Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras and Dominica as member states.

In response to the controversial Organization of American States, which is viewed by many in Latin America as a way for the United States to apply economic and political pressure against countries in the region, ALBA has a released a statement which strongly condemns the recent OAS summit and pronounces their world view.

In their statement, which covers a broad range of issues, ALBA calls for universal access to telecommunications (phone, internet, etc) as a human right in a world which increasingly relies on networked communications:

Basic education, health, water, energy and telecommunications services should be declared human rights and cannot be subject to private deal or marketed by the World Trade Organization. These services are and should be essentially public utilities of universal access.

This ideal has driven many of the policies of Latin American countries inside and outside of ALBA, including Brazil.

FLISOL - The Latin American Festivals of Installation of Free Software are install fests organized by the regional free software communities since 2005. The event is the largest distributed free software event in the world — last year, there were install fests in more than 200 cities in 18 countries in Latin America.

The goal of the event is to promote the use of free software, so the general public can know its philosophy, install GNU/Linux on their computers, learn about the applications and understand how they are developed by volunteer communities. Every install fest is free of charge in every location and they also include lectures, presentations and workshops.

Check out the list of countries hosting the event:

Open Veins of Latin America, a book originally written in 1971 by Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano (with a revised edition released in 1997), was given to President Obama by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez during the Summit of the Americas this past weekend and, as a result, has shot to the top of Amazon’s Bestseller List. Yesterday, it incredibly went all the way up to the #2 spot on Amazon’s list. At the time of this writing, the book is now #7 on the Bestseller List. Before President Chavez gave the book to Obama, it was the 54,295th most popular book on Amazon. While this news is a little off-topic for this website, we thought it was interesting enough to share.

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.