Simon Morris wrote:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 11:50:41 +0000, Graham Seaman graham@theseamans.net wrote:
I think what people are looking for is something like hipatia (http://www.hipatia.info/) which connects activists across Latin America/Spain/Italy and India.
Looks great.. what do they do apart from the website?
Website itself is mainly a document repository (there are also an attached news site and wiki), but so far it hasn't really been the core of things, which is the mailing lists.
As individuals, many members are involved with use of free software in their national government/public services (eg. Venezuela, Brazil, Peru), and hipatia has been a way of co-ordinating this internationally. Also strongly involved with the World Social Forums, trying to provide free software services for the events and to convince NGOs linked with the Social Forums they should be using FS. Also following events in WIPO related to patents, software etc. And developing ideas on human rights/digital rights. But it isn't the kind of organization that works like a party with everyone following one party line - more a bunch of people with related ideas/interests who help one another, there's lots more things going on that I haven't mentioned.
My foreign language skills aren't good enough to tell from the site.
Nearly all the most interesting documents are in Spanish, and not translated yet :-(
Are they active in the UK at all?
As far as I know there are only two members from the UK (none from the US). And we never organized anything in the UK at all. There's an english language mailing list, but so far it's totally quiet. I don't know how to get round that - I think one reason for Hipatia's success so far is exactly that it doesn't make people communcate in english.
Graham
~sm