Join FLISOL 2012!

It’s that time of the year again - FLISOL, the “Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre” (Latin American free software install fest) will start in about 6 weeks! If you live in Latin America, you can join one of the hundreds of install fests happening all over the continent on April 28th. And if there is nothing close by, there is no reason you can’t organize it yourself…

Luiz Augusto Machado, openSUSE ambassador from Brazil, invited all Ambassadors and anyone else interested in openSUSE in Latin America to participate and support openSUSE at FLISOL 2012. This is the event to teach anyone interested in Software Libre about the cool things the world wide community around Linux and other open projects has done.

What can I do?

Helping others play with Free Software is not hard. You don’t have to know a lot - just more than those you teach! And neither does it have to be complicated and perfect. A room at your office or university combined with a blog and asking colleagues and friends to come makes for a fine FLISOL!

You can help people install a Linux on their laptops! Any Windows or Mac install you replace with a Linux, be it Mint, Fedora, PC BSD or of course openSUSE, is a win for the owner of the system. Another little step towards a world where people own their hardware, control their data and are Free to do what they want with both! So be sure to bring DVD’s or USB sticks with which to install openSUSE! You can request openSUSE DVD’s for an event here . Be sure to order early.

You can talk about your favorite project, be it GNOME, the Kernel, openSUSE, Blender, LibreOffice - and show people what it is, how to use it and why. openSUSE has a number of standard presentations you can use in our marketing github repository (click here for a quick how-to on getting stuff from github). Note that the presentations have ‘notes’ and we also of course have a template you can use for your own slides!

So, now?

A number of ambassadors has already replied that there will be events in their vicinity. Brazil already has four confirmed lectures on openSUSE, Guatamala two, and we have confirmed events in El Salvador, Panama and Chile and more is of course coming. If you want to attend or help out, you can find out if your city is already involved here. If not, we encourage you to consider organizing openSUSE attendance to your local FLISOL or even organizing the FLISOL event to also have fun spreading the FOSS culture in your city! Remember to add your participation in the openSUSE Ambassadors events page.