Again Latin America is the place where it’s happening, this time i’d like to guide the reader’s attention to Venezuela where last week the Third Worldwide Free Knowledge Forum was held. Attendees discussed how open source software can be and is employed in administration, economy, and universities. Por ejemplo, in Venezuela an open source law will take effect next year that postulates a 2-year transition to open source software in all public agencies including the oil industry:

This should be on every open source hacker’s radar. Venezuala is going to need lots of open source hackers to help “train the trainers” for their migration process. The idea of open software as accumulative knowledge is really emphasized there. Reusability is a key concept. I think we can expect to see many contributions to CPAN, Sourceforge, and other repositories as a result of this move.
 
A representative of the national office of Intellectual Property remarked, not entirely in jest, that the name of his department should be changed to “Intellectual Prosperity” to shift the focus from ownership of ideas to the accumulation and reuse of ideas for the public benefit. Other attendees gave concrete examples of such benefits—a project supporting development of small FLOSS work-cooperatives to stimulate local economies; projects with Indians and other marginalized groups; projects to take work-flow apps developed for industry and reuse them in municipal governments to increase transparency and efficiency. […]

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