Yesterday I gave a talk at Campus Party BR. Lots of people there (over 6800 registered campers according to the site). But it is a very different environment compared with the free software conferences I am used to attend. There were 8 areas, including robotics, games, science, security and others. I talked at the Free Software area stage, about “KDE: the software and the community”. It was well received, and compared with the first talk I gave at Campus Party (in 2008) I could see that the awareness for free software and KDE inside events like this grew a lot. Still, it was strange to be among almost 30 very young guys and girls all dressed as Microsoft Student Partners, whatever that is 🙂

Still, the free software area was well organized, and I could reconnect with some friends like Cristiano and Gustavo. The talks there represented a good selection of the main free software projects and the organizers have scheduled a nice mix of talks and workshops, so people that are interested in free software can surely have a productive week while camped.

Highlights of the day for me were the talk by Al Gore and Tim-Berners Lee (two “creators” of the internet in the same stage, hehe.) and the blackout near 6 PM, which lasted for almost two hours. It was very interesting to be there while the lights went out in a huge area of the city but the Campus Party place remained illuminated by thousands of LCD screens. Of course the net link went down, so after about 5 minutes people started to organize demonstrations and marches. Thirty minutes later forced socialization began, finally 🙂 Thankfully the lights returned one hour before my scheduled slot, with plenty of time to get everything back on. The talk about the UCA project (one computer per student) that followed mine was also very interesting, specially because some schools are running ClassMates with KDE software.

PS: Huge thanks to Sandro Andrade and the LiveBlue website, as I could reuse almost 80% of a presentation Sandro prepared for ENSL. If it were not for this help I doubt I would be able to give this talk, as personal life issues are making it difficult for me to find time for coding and FLOSS. Thanks man!