Linux Party [warning political]

[Graham Seaman]

Simon Morris wrote:

>On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 11:50:41 +0000, Graham Seaman <graham at 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
>  
>