DrupalCamp Centroamerica 2010 in Guatemala

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:26:18 +0000

Last weekend (25 and 26 June 2010) took place the second DrupalCamp in Central America, the venue was this time the education center INTECAP in Guatemala. With 264 participants, it exceeded by more than double the number of participants for the DrupalCamp 2009 in Nicaragua. It brought together people from many fields: developers, designers, users, and both national and international companies to discuss the CMS/Framework Drupal. Another specific objective of the DrupalCamp was to strength and extend the still quite young Drupal community in Central America.

A variety of workshops and presentations were held, ranging from introductory courses about the installation and basic functionality of Drupal, CCK and Views, template creation, and Drupal oriented design processes to programming for Drupal, Semantic Web, Drupal and governments (in Central America).

It was a very refreshing weekend with a lot of exchange of experiences and many surprises. I particularly liked the lecture "Drupal in the government" in which Jonathan Lara (Blog, Twitter) was giving away secrets about how Drupal is taken into consideration by the Guatemalan government for future eGovernment projects.

Drupal definitely has made strong noise once again and is on the way to a broad application in Latin America and the wider Spanish-speaking countries. As the initiator of the first DrupalCamps in Central America, it has moved me most, that this DrupalCamp has become such a huge success and Drupal is on a serious way in this region. This is due to the incredible efforts of the organizers, who not only executed the DrupalCamp further they have built up within a year, an active Drupal community in Guatemala: Celeste Arreaga @ CelesteArreaga , Edgar Dueñas @ leddu , Francisco Boche @tufrac, Isaac Ordonez @kaasi, Marlon Alvarado @elguil.

Website: http://drupal-centroamerica.org (Spanish)
Twitter: http://twitter.com/drupal_ca (Spanish)
Photos (by Eduardo Rosales), More photos (Unknown source)

First Central American Free Software Summit

admin — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:39:36 +0000

From the 17th of June till 21th of June 2009 the First Central American Free Software Summit was taking place in Nicaragua's northern mountains close to Estelí.

Over 80 persons met from all Central American countries and some others from the all over the world (Mexico, Venezuela, Spain, Austria and Germany). Everybody was connected through the common ideology of Free Software and sharing. The majority of the attendants actively participate within local Linux User Groups inside of their countries. On the summit everybody loved to discuss topics like Free Software and government, Translation and adaption of open licenses to local jurisdictions, the role of women and Free Software in education (http://sl-centroamerica.org/wiki/Ecsl2009/Agenda).

There were a lot of interesting workshops on different topics. I feel very honored that I was invited to lead a Drupal workshop (A volar con Drupal).

Besides the official agenda there was a lot of time to get to know (almost) everybody pretty well. It was an very stimulant interexchange and a lot of new, promising ideas have been developed.
Further a very important step has been done by founding a commission that is going to organize the Central American Free Software movement and future events.

A general and public declaration was set up and signed by the attendants.

Photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/jimbodoors94/ECSL
http://gwolf.org/album/encuentro-centroamericano-de-software-libre-2009-0

Videos: http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=ecsl2009

Blogs:
http://leogg.wordpress.com/category/ecsl/ (Spanish/English)
http://adario21.wordpress.com/2009/06/20/ecsl-nicaragua-dia-0/ (Spanish)
http://luisalvarado.blogspot.com/2009/06/ecsl-dia-2-mesas-de-trabajo.html (Spanish)
http://www.normangarcia.info/blog/archives/228 (Spanish)

admin's blog

DrupalCamp Centroamerica 2010 in Guatemala

First Central American Free Software Summit