3rd Forum KDE Brazil: going country-wide

Hello everyone,

It's been awhile since last post. I've been really bogged down in recent weeks in light of my Ph.D. research, but I can't stay long without gearing my head. This year has been quite fruitful for KDE Brazil in terms of consolidating our five local groups and having them starting their own efforts to show off all the beauty and glory of KDE (hehe). After the birth of our beloved Akademy-BR (last April in Salvador-BA) and with the traditional Forum KDE Brazil in its 3rd edition at FISL 2010 (last July in Porto Alegre-RS), we articulated a more integrated and stronger approach for the 4th Brazilian Northeastern Free Software Meeting (ENSL) and 7th Latinoware. After getting dizzy looking for a name and format for the KDE presence in such events we ended up opting to strengthen our Forum KDE Brazil overarching brand by localizing it in specialized editions. While Akademy-BR goals include bringing together contributors from all over the country to discuss topics and have some sprint-like atmosphere, Forum KDE Brazil has been the major opportunity to spread the hot topics and trends of KDE and also get some feedback from the general audience. For that purpose we are about to have the 3rd Forum KDE Brazil - Northeastern Edition at ENSL and_ 3rd Forum KDE Brazil - Latin-American Edition_ at Latinoware. Yes, three gatherings in three very strategic regions of Brazil.

ENSL is the largest free software meeting in northeastern Brazil, integrating states with very active communities devoted to KDE, Gnome, ArchLinux, digital art, among others. It grew up from the Free Software Festival of Bahia - a smaller meeting started in 2003 and in which I was presenting a short-course about Qt(v2.?)/KDevelop3. Nowadays ENSL receives speakers from all over the country (and some from overseas this year) and the organizing team expects roughly 500-600 attenders in the two days of event. Besides the main track for general talks, ENSL encompasses our two-day Forum KDE Brazil and also the 7th Forum Gnome and that's of course great (any similarities ... mere coincidence) :).

I met Lamarque and Amanda in the plane from Salvador and we arrived in Natal about 2 p.m. Some of the other guys were already here: Filipe, Aracele e Chicão and we should meet Helio, Paulo Rômulo, and Anselmo tomorrow in the venue. ENSL has yielded a great expectation in the local free software community as we can see in ENSL profiles at Identica and Twitter. In the first day of ENSL we are going to have talks about the KDE community, translation activities, development, KDE and Summer of Code, and KDE development for mobile platforms. The second day is devoted to short-courses on Qt, Plasma widgets development, and D-Bus. In the closing we'll raffle some swags probably by asking some curious questions about KDE :)

With no time to breathe, three days after ENSL is over, we head to Foz do Iguaçu to the 7th  Latin-American Conference on Free Software. KDE Brazil has actively been participating in last three editions of Latinoware and we had the pleasure of having Anne-Marie and Adrian with us last year. This year we draw the first steps towards integrating the KDE communities in Latin America by having Ronny Aizcorbe, from Peru, presenting a talk about 3D Development with Qt and KDE. Helio has been in Chile some weeks ago for a KDE talk in their major free software conference and we hope to have a wider participation from Argentina, Peru and Chile next year.

Further information (and some pics of course) about the Day 1 of KDE in ENSL tomorrow ...

See you ...