Fernanda Weiden of FSF Latin America was in Dublin today with some free time, so an open invite was sent to the members of IFSO on short notice and Myself, Paul O'Malley, and Ben North met her for Sunday lunch. I had previously mentioned bits of the events idea on the IFSO committee and IFSO members lists.
Besides the talk by Federico, which has to happen at the end of April and has to therefore be organised soon, this can be discussed at a leisurly pace.
Three members of FSFLA's seven-person committee will be in or near Ireland in the coming months, so, in the medium- to long-term future we'll have the opportunity to host talks which should be interesting and would usually be financially impossible.
Federico Heinz will be in Europe (Brussels precisely) and will be available for travel from noon on April 28th until probably the 2nd of May or so. So we can get him for the price of flights.
Fernanda Weiden now lives in Zurich and might occasionally come to Dublin for work reasons. So we can get her cheap or possibly free.
Mario Bonilla will be living in Dublin some time after May, so we can get him presumably for free.
The events should be seperated by a few weeks or a few months.
Idea #1: --------
Host a talk by Federico at the end of April, and some time later, host a double talk with Fernanda and Mario.
I've heard that Federico is one of free software's best speakers, he's the president of FSFLA, and he's one of the nine official GNU speakers, so I think he could make an event on his own. Having him talk on "free software in education" was suggested and he's enthusiastic about that.
Fernanda and Mario might also be great speakers, but I don't know that, so I recommend they be teamed up to ensure a great event.
Idea #2: --------
Like as #1, but instead of Fernanda+Mario event, we could do a Fernanda + someone from FSFE, and a Mario + someone else from FSFE event. FSFE people should be fairly cheap to get over. The FSFE counter-part could be chosen based on what topics would compliment the topics of the FSFLA speaker.
Notes: -----------
I think organising events is important for IFSO because we can record them and put them online. Any organisation could do that, but IFSO actually does it. After 5 years, excluding recordings made by IFSO, only 1 person from FSFE has recordings online (Georg), and 0 people from FSFLA have recordings online. So I think we can vastly improve on that, and host three very interesting talks cheaply.
Having talks online is important for a load of reasons:
* people who can't attend (most of the world) can hear the event's content
* people wanting to learn about speaking and communicating techniques can study the recordings
* people can make transcripts ( http://www.ifso.ie/documents/#transcripts ) These can be used by deaf people, search engines, grep, copy and paste, etc.
* it creates a record of something done by the speakers - in the case of FSFLA members this is particularly useful because they were only set up last November, so their current record is very thin
* recordings can be used by people who are organising other events, to check if the recorded speaker is good.
Comments sought.