Helsinki ... Cesar Brod (Brazil) goes down the decades....
Frederick Noronha
Helsinki
University of Helsinki, where we had many of our meetings and where Linus Torvalds studied
Helsinki I
It is only fair to say that the blame goes to Rafael Rigues, who wrote a post about the fondly remembered Revista do Linux. I did a little “vanity check” by searching the magazine's site for my name and discovered some interesting things. One of them is this account of my first trip to Finland, where, being the provincial that I am, I discovered that Helsinki has a lot in common with Arroio do Meio, in Rio Grande do Sul. The issue was edited by Fernando Lozano. Links that no longer exist have been replaced by archived versions from the Internet Archive.
In an excavation in England, archaeologists found parallel iron bars dating from 1677 and concluded that the first railways had been built by the British. In Spain, they found pairs of copper cables dating from 1795 and concluded that the first telephone cables had been used there. An archaeological investigation financed by numerous American companies discovered fibre-optic cables buried for more than 120 years. In Finland, they dug and dug and found nothing. Finnish archaeologists concluded that mobile telephony had first been used in Finland. Not even two days in Helsinki and I already know some local jokes!
If, in 1993, when I first used Linux, someone had told me that in 2002 I would be in the homeland of the creator of the kernel, I would have asked: “Who actually created this thing?” The world is small. Finland isn't very big either: four million inhabitants, of whom 500,000 live in Helsinki—or 1.5 million if you count the satellite towns. And that doesn't include the elves of Lapland, which is a little farther north.
If it snowed in Arroio do Meio (Editor's note: a municipality in the interior of Rio Grande do Sul), it would look a lot like Helsinki, except for the Baltic Sea, which is a little smaller than the Taquari River when it is in flood. At other times, it's practically identical. Everything here is very clean, perhaps because the snow makes everything white, white, white.
I am working at the offices of Kepa, an association of NGOs supported by the Finnish government. OneWorld.Net and its local office were commissioned by the Minister responsible for development assistance to find out how free software influences developing countries socially and economically—a political term for what we used to call the Third World at school.
The idea is to find out whether the government of Linus's country should allocate funds to free-software projects in Latin America, Africa and poorer parts of Asia. Although all the regional coordinators of this project, coordinated by Niranjan Rajani—myself, Nico Coetzee from South Africa and Frederick [FN] Noronha from India—are connected with the Free Software movement, the minister has several agendas and priorities. In other words, at the beginning of the meeting we were warned that the whole project might end up being merely a “reference for the future”. The results, however, will be published for public criticism.
One of the things we discussed today was women's participation in the information-technology labour market and how free software might help in this respect—one of the areas highlighted in relation to employment and income generation.
I immediately contacted the GNURIAS, and Preta (Ana Paula A. Valério) quickly responded with an extensive list of suggestions. Preta sees women's versatility and ability to adapt as a positive advantage when looking for work in a market whose business logic is constantly changing. What she implies, less explicitly, is women's natural concern for others, the impulse to care for people—the best word I can find for it is the English word nurturing. (I'm not showing off; it's just tiredness making words escape me. If anyone has better suggestions, I'd be grateful!)
Speaking of Preta, her project to use free software as an educational aid for disadvantaged populations in northern Brazil has just been approved by the Universidade Solidária programme. Preta had already been thinking about doing something along these lines since we made contact with a group of female teachers during the first free-software training programme we gave to NTEs. By following the Free School Network project and the work of Ofset (Organization for Free Software Education and Teaching), Preta developed her own project, exchanging ideas with her mother, who is a teacher. Preta is a gem!
Helsinki II
The world is small. When I arrived at Helsinki airport, I shared a taxi to the city centre with a journalist who knew Linus's parents. I was wearing a LinuxWorld sweatshirt, which prompted the conversation. When I expressed my surprise, she said that almost everyone in Helsinki knows one another.
I told her it was the same in Arroio do Meio and asked, looking out of the window, “What river is this?” She replied that it was the Baltic Sea. The worst part was that I had already looked at the map and still managed to display my geographical ignorance.
Her father had been a friend of Linus's grandfather, and she said he used to tell stories about his friend's grandson and how interested he was in “machines”. Wonderful.
Today all of us presented the projects we are involved in. As usual, it was a success. People are genuinely interested in increasing women's participation in the labour market and, besides practically translating the e-mail Preta had sent me—Preta, send it to the mailing lists!—I was able to say more about GNURIAS.
Helsinki III
Finland should really be called the land of the rising sun. The sun takes ages to rise here, and then it takes ages to set. The whole process begins at almost nine in the morning and ends around four in the afternoon. That's why everything here is white, even the people. But you can't see much of them—only their little eyes.
How I miss the Brazilian summer and the young ladies' bare legs! Turn on the webcams and send me the URLs!!!
At the height of winter (yes, and it has barely begun), people mistake the sun for a UFO.
On Thursday, all the participants in the “Helsinki Project” met at Kepa headquarters to present the preliminary results of research seeking to determine the socioeconomic advances directly associated with free software in emerging economies.
On Friday, each participant presented their projects and personal experiences to the general public. These meetings and the final report will produce proposals for the Finnish ministries responsible for foreign affairs and development assistance. They may or may not provide resources for selected projects intended for application on a global scale.
The young philosophy professor Tere Vadén, from the Hypermedia Laboratory at the University of Tampere, discussed intellectual property and pointed out—as Professor Imre Simon has often reminded us—that the free-software movement is one manifestation of something much larger: freedom for every kind of human knowledge.
Professor Vadén is going to send us a copy of his lecture. Among other things, he makes a mathematical reductio ad absurdum of the definition of intellectual property. If all information is proprietary, then the information that information itself is proprietary would also be proprietary, ultimately making every form of information invalid.
He also argues that intellectual property is never neutral: for good or ill, it is always aligned with some philosophical or political position. He concludes that even where intellectual property may be well-intentioned, it has never demonstrated practical benefit.
There's an idea for the next Forum! Especially at a time when some proposals coming to the mailing list suggest that some people have lost—or never really understood—the movement's central focus. Before seeking practical results for one business or another, the movement seeks to recognise that knowledge must always be free.
Professor Tere begins his lecture, incidentally, by defining the term “knowledge” and showing that, by its very definition, it cannot belong to anyone.
How about a panel chaired by Professor Imre Simon, with Professors Heber Godoy and Tere Vadén—and, if money permits, Lawrence Lessig of Open Law and Pierre Lévy—debating these issues with the audience? Put Marcelo Branco or Rubens Queiroz (or both at once!) directly in contact with the audience, playing the role of Serginho Groissmann in his good old days. It would be a session people would talk about!
Helsinki IV
With the meetings over, although I will remain at Kepa headquarters until Monday (on Tuesday I leave for Frankfurt at the invitation of Ralf Nolden of KDevelop), the team has already begun preparing its conclusions, which we will work on over the next three months.
Frankly, when I accepted this assignment, using the ten hours a week I had left—thirty hours are devoted to my work at UNIVATES—I never imagined that I would have to stretch those hours into nights and weekends.
So here is my public acknowledgement to my wife and daughters, who have always accepted the fact that “Daddy's job is kind of weird”, and to UNIVATES, which has always allowed me to use its resources—office space, Internet access and so on—even when I wasn't working directly for the university, recognising that projects such as this also represent a direct return to the institution.
And since I'm bringing everything out into the open anyway (oh, how I miss it!), I have to give special thanks and affection to Josi, my secretary and GNURIA, who has looked after my schedule and after me with particular care and professionalism.
One of our conclusions is that there is still much more work to be done. In Latin America specifically, I still need to collect more data on the information and communications infrastructure of every country: the history of information technology, access to telephones, distribution of radios and televisions, and everything else.
Any information people can provide to contribute to the research would be greatly appreciated. The idea, in short, is to determine ways of extending the reach of free information—allowing it to “jump” from the Internet to other media—by connecting infrastructure in general with the proposals being developed.
At the same time, we recognise that many problems have to be solved even before free software—or any other information technology—can begin to have an impact.
I brought Maslow's hierarchy of needs into the discussion and it ended up becoming rather important...
Helsinki V
I spent a good part of the day—about four hours (yes, because the rest of the time it's night!)—between the Postal Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.
Because it snows so much here, the postman is something of a hero, almost on the same level as Erik the Red.
I preferred the Postal Museum. I spent more than an hour writing postcards that will arrive in Brazil after I do. It doesn't matter. They served as a painkiller for homesickness.
When, in my previous e-mail, I mentioned Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I think it becomes clear that, when talking about Latin America, non-industrialised Asia (India, Pakistan...) and Africa (Ethiopia, Mozambique...), sustainable-development assistance is something very serious.
So, in identifying solutions that use free software to address problems such as education and employment and income generation, the Rede Escolar Livre RS, together with initiatives creating telecentres for marginalised populations, ended up receiving considerable attention in my presentation.
Let me digress briefly to answer a question I've been receiving from everyone: yes, the work will be published.
I agreed to do it only if I could publish it under the FDL (Free Documentation License) and, if for any reason that proved impossible, if I were allowed to publish my part on my website and permit anyone interested to link directly to it—tricks I learned from Professor Imre.
The people at OneWorld took up my request and the Minister eventually had to be briefed on what the FDL was.
The result: everything will be published under the FDL, but the participants were asked to make their copies public only together, when the project was completed. A public portal will be created containing our research, so that everyone can criticise it and contribute to it.
But there is no secret here. I have spoken openly about what I am doing and many people in Latin America have contributed.
UTUTO, from Diego Saravia, and the excellent organisation of UYLUG in Uruguay, together with the LUGAR and AULA projects in Argentina and the NGO Via Libre, deserve special mention.
Projects integrating universities in Nicaragua and schools in Colombia are also involved. Thanks to Marcelo Branco, I was able to include good data about Cuba.
People from Guatemala, Costa Rica and Peru have also contributed.
I still need information about Chile, from which I have received nothing, as well as the British and French territories and the United States territories in South America and the Caribbean—Belize, Trinidad and Tobago, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and others—which, because of their special characteristics, will be included in the next stage of the work.
And as I have already said, all help is welcome.
In South Africa, one of the biggest infrastructure problems is access to electricity. You can install a copper cable bringing electricity to a peripheral community and it will disappear the next day. Copper is expensive and there is an entire cable-theft mafia.
In India, the level of illiteracy is so high that infrastructure capable of providing Internet access has already reached illiterate people. Now the concern is to create a computer that can be used by illiterate people, rather than first teaching them to read and write and only then teaching them to use a computer.
This forces us to remember that literacy is not directly connected with culture. Even before writing existed—or when writing was still inaccessible to most people—much culture had already been created.
A project like this makes us reaffirm some very basic values.
On my way home, I am going to make more of an effort to tell my daughters the stories my grandparents used to tell and which were never written down. And, since I can, I will write them down before they are lost.
However trivial they may seem, the stories that make up our lives have to survive so that future generations can have a more complete sense of who we are.
I also discovered that the degree I am capable of completing is Philosophy. I'll only return to Physics when I retire and can devote the time it deserves.
Einstein used to say that mathematics was the language God used to write the Universe. If that's so, I think philosophy is the foundation of mathematics, physics and all the supposedly exact sciences.
Helsinki VI
For the public presentation held on Friday, we agreed that Niranjan, who coordinated the work, would give an overview of the state of free software in developing countries; Fred would speak about India, which by itself is a continent; and Nico would concentrate on infrastructure problems.
I was asked to speak about practical experiences, particularly those of PSL-RS and, above all, UNIVATES, including the SOLIES project, an initiative of the Federal University of São Carlos in São Paulo that brought higher-education institutions together to think about a joint strategy for free software.
It shouldn't be long before the “São Carlos Charter” appears online.
I've already discussed this in other e-mails to the project's mailing list, so I'll simply say that the only initiative that came close to what the people in São Carlos did was the Venezuelan initiative, which brought together four universities for a unified project to adopt free software in academic and administrative environments.
(How many universities are there in Brazil again? There were about 40 in São Carlos, and the universities belonging to the Brazilian Computer Society alone must already make a huge number...)
The audience wasn't technical, but nevertheless three things really impressed them:
- MIOLO, its plans for the future and its role as a tool for the rapid development of applications.
- RAU-TU—remember, the audience wasn't technical—which is a tool that anyone who isn't using yet really should be. At UNIVATES we are implementing RAU-TU “Madame Myrna”, a project by Marcelo Malheiros and Júnior Alex Mulinari offering voluntary emotional advice to desperate hearts.
- The OpenOffice internal training course that UNIVATES is offering to its employees using TELEDUC. (I remind you that the audience wasn't technical, and I'm not trying to sneak in any subliminal advertising here.)
Since I'm a student/co-trainer on the course, I was able to demonstrate that day's lesson, a typesetting exercise to which, coincidentally—really!—I had contributed.
The person responsible for the course is Figui, whom some people on the mailing list also know, another GNURIA.
The whole idea of using TELEDUC for internal training actually began with yet another woman, Ciliane, from EMATER. If she isn't on the mailing list, perhaps someone from EMATER can pass this on to her.
In the next issue of Revista do Linux, Brod will write about his stopover in Frankfurt, Germany, where he met KDevelop developer Ralf Nolden.
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