Yesterday and today I have the pleasure of participating in the Sector 3.0 (gotta love the wordplay) NGO-targeted conference, as a FLOSS Foundation representative. Great fun!

Loads of fantastic people, loads of fantastic organisations, loads of awesome ideas. Knowledge flows wide and untamed in both directions. Such initiatives are much-needed in Poland, as are NGOs in general.

One important result of me being here is refreshing or making new contacts with Fun People. Fun People tend to do Fun Stuff. And we all love Fun Stuff.

The second result – well, I’m writing this about an hour before my workshop on Free Software. From what I see I’ll be having quite a few participants, so we’ll talk about more results in about 3 hours. I hope I’ll be able to transfer some knowledge to others, in exchange for the whole knowledge I got in those two days from all the great activists.

Summary¶

My workshop was a total success – about 20 people attended, seems like I was even able to keep them interested throughout the whole 1.5h deal. It turned out to be more of a presentation, though, as the attendees had next to none exposure to FLOSS before. Somehow people got involved anyway and spoke up, we had a nice discussion about pros and cons, and what FLOSS actually is.

I was at least a bit surprised when after the workshop the attendees started to come to me and congratulate on it. I was doing it basically unprepared (it got on the agenda the night before), so it was really gratifying.

By the way, I think I found a great way of promoting FLOSS. It starts rather classically:

• ask who among the attendees uses FLOSS;
• show them that most of them actually do (Firefox, OpenOffice, Wikipedia’s FLOSS engine…);
• define FLOSS (the Four Freedoms, some more general description.

Now, here’s the fun part:

• ask attendees to create two lists – pros and cons of FLOSS;
• then, ask them to classify those according to whether they differ among the projects (like support quality), or are FLOSS-definition-related (like ability to share with others).

Guess what? Almost all if not all of the cons differ among the projects. Almost all pros – are definition-related. The kicker is: when using FLOSS you might get the cons, but you always get the pros.

Wideo¶

The workshop was being recorded – why Kamil Śliwowski decided to record it is beyond me, though. Anyway, video is supposed to be on-line in a couple of weeks, I’ll post a link as soon as I get it.

Update

First video is up at YouTube. Longer video, only fro my workshop, on its way.