CONSEGI 2008 Report-Back and Summary
This page is continued from A full report-back from CONSEGI 2008 in Brasilia, Brazil, a post on North by South’s news website, Free Software in Latin America. For a full itemization of CONSEGI 2008 posts, see: Free software history was made at CONSEGI.
When asked about the future of free software migration in Brazil, Mr Mazoni explained that the Free Software Committee is conducting research to collect information from the various sectors of the government about their free software migration progress and, then, inviting them to share their solutions with the rest of the community, coordinated by the Committee. He reiterated that it is also important to incentive the economy around free software by creating more government-sponsored research and development, as well as investing in small companies who work exclusively with free software. He also plans on pushing for the creation of tools to allow the participation of individuals and small companies in the free software network that exists within the government.
Other problems presented during the conference were the difficulties that the government attorneys were having, allow government institutions to release their code under the GPL license. Mr Mazoni pointed out SERPRO’s difficulties and how the Free Software Foundation Latin America worked with their legal department and now they finally got an agreement and are able to release their code under GPL license.
Free Software Migration Strategies
Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, South Africa, Venezuela:
Mass Participation, Hackers Defending Against an Attempted Industrial Oil Coup, Changing Society as the Movement Grows
On the last day of CONSEGI at the panel “Migration to Free Software,” representatives from Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela and South Africa presented the progress of their migration process in the respective countries. The panel also gave space to the civil society (Free Software Associations) from Argentina and Ecuador to present their work in those countries as well. Below is a summary of each presentation:
- Martin Oliveira - SOLAR - Software Libre Argentina:
Starting the presentations, Martin played a YouTube video of a shoal of fishes swimming freely but all going towards the same direction. He compared it to the migration processes happening in Latin American countries. All the teams responsible for such work tries to plan everything that is possible, but the situation is always mutatin so they are forced to change strategies all the time. He suggested that groups start planning on tasks that can be executed in a short time (a month, for instance), make sure the group agrees with it, and then maintain quicky daily meetings, where updates would be given: what was done yesterday, what the group will do today, etc. - Deivi Lopes Kuhn - SERPRO - Brazil IT State Company:
Deivi did a retrospective of the Brazilian migration process. He reported that at the beginning, the problem they faced was the concept. Not that many people knew what free software was, so the first thing they had to do was explain the concept to other public employees. And they had to always debate the marketing of the proprietary software, which tried to confuse the public, but the debates ended up clarifying the new features and benefits that free software was bringing to the society.
Then, they moved on to the second part of the job, to generate awareness through debates promoted inside of the federal government bodies. The Presidential Decree had created the federal Technical Committee for the Implementation of Free Software with the participation of 100 people. The first question the Committee had was where to begin — servers or desktops? Since the work they were doing was unprecedented, they had now “HOWTO” to give them guidance. A series of documents were created to serve as a reference for the government bodies, such as the Migration Guide, E-ping - a series of standard suggestions for all the government bodies to adopt for their IT solutions, communication protocols and file systems.
The Migration Guide suggests that each government body prepare a plan containing actions they would take immediately, to share software, to give visibility to successful cases, adopt ODF as the standard document format for the government and standardize on Brazil’s version of OpenOffice, Broffice.org. The Migration Guide also encouraged training people on free software, and as part of this process the ITI - Institute of IT of the Presidency - created classes using Moodle, which anyone who had a .gov.br email could take. The Committee also promoted research to collect information about the progress of the migration process in the different government bodies. ITI also aimed to promote industrial development of software development.
Finally, Deivi recalled some of the challenges faced by the migration group, such as the constant actions by proprietary software companies and the necessity to improve the state’s technical labor pool through training. - Aslam Raffee - Chairman, Government IT Officer’s Council Working Group on Open Standards Open Source Software - South Africa:
Aslam began by saying that the whole continent of Africa is inspired by the work Brazil is doing. He remarked that the Brazilians have a great responsibility amongst developing nations because everyone is looking at them for guidance and inspiration. South Africa, in particular, has had a strong relationship with Brazil, working on migration to free software. He announced an event that will be hosted in South Africa for Governments that are migrating to ODF and there will be participation by representatives from Brazil (SERPRO) and members of Latin American Free Software Associations. The event will take place October 9th and 10th in Pretoria, South Africa. For more information, see the website for the 2nd Annual International OpenDocument Format User Workshop. - Eduardo Alvear - Presidency’s Sub-Secretary of Technology - Ecuador:
Eduardo Alvear is the Director of Regulation, Integration and Control of Ecuador’s Office of the Sub-Secretary of Technology. He spoke about the 1014 Free Software Decree issued by President Rafael Correa on April 10th, 2008.
He talked about the strategies to archive the entire migration effort, with the idea that there is no right formula for it and only through applied, practical efforts will countries find plans that work for them. For the next three weeks, each government institution will sit in on “technology tables” to work on their migration plans. As part of the free software policy in the country they are also building partnerships with universities so the students can learn about free software and to promote it. He explained the importance of building communities, especially so that the government can share their knowledge with the people. He highlighted some of the operating systems and applications they had been focusing on: CentOS, Postgresql, OpenOffice, PHP, Java, Drupal, Joomla, eBox, IPCOP, LDAP, egroupware, Virtual Box and Mozilla Firefox. - Rafael Bonifaz - ASLE - Ecuador:
“Now we can form a family … we have our older brother, Brazil, the middle one, Venezuela, and the youngest, Ecuador,” said Rafael. And, he jokingly added, “… with a new baby on the way in Paraguay.” Rafael talked about Paraguay’s announcement during CONSEGI that their government will also start a complete migration process to free software. Back home, he posted on his blog an article that fully expressed his feelings after CONSEGI which you can read in the original Spanish here or the rough English translation made by NXS: here. - Carlos Figueira - CNTI - Venezuela:
Venezuela actually started to use Free Software in the 70’s inside the academic communities and this helped bring about the birth of the first communities in the 90’s. In 2002-2003, Venezuela developed its national conscience about free software after after an extraordinary event at their national oil company, PDVSA: while in the process of re-nationalizing the company, the managerial level (with strong support from foreign, “imperial powers”) locked out the workers and the IT managers did their part by illegally shifting control of PDVSA’s computer systems to an outside, foreign group of collaborators. Little did the IT managers know but the IT workers were pro-nationalization, and thwarted their efforts to sabotage PDVSA’s computer systems! The IT workers also secured crucial video tape which showed military troops illegally seizing parts of PDVSA’s facilities. Who would have thought that hackers would save the day? To this day, the Venezuelan free software community is proud of their involvement in securing Venezuela’s oil industry for the benefit of the Venezuelan people, instead of multinational corporations who attempted an illegal “oil coup.”
After that, in 2004, the Decree 3.390 was created which gives priority to the use of free software and open standards. The government started to organize a migration process, creating awareness programs and the creation of the Free Software Academy. Since then, Venezuela has been one of the leaders of the Latin American free software movement. Every government institution was given a 2-year deadline to deliver a free software migration plan. Carlos said that most of the migration problems were human — not because of the technology — and that this must be considered while developing a successful migration strategy. Out of the 300 government organizations required to deliver a plan, only about 100 actually met the deadline, some more complete than the others. But this was just the beginning of the process and much more work has to be done to integrate all the organizations, including education about free software solutions that can execute their work, research and especially raising awareness in the community about the free software philosophy. So far, Venezuela has migrated 70% of its government services to free software and around 20-25% of the working stations used within government offices.
