News Story

Havana, Stallman, Software Libre, google.cu !

Marc Eisenstadt, Monday 12 Feb 2007

Hey, it’s not Comdex… but the joint is seriously jumpin’… I’m in Havana at Informataca 2007, the biggest hi-tech gig to hit this town in, well, ever. It’s a meta-conference – 15 major conferences all taking place at once (list below), huge exhibitss, tons of delegates from around the world, and some interesting- looking gigs.

Besides, I’ve learned three things already:

1. I’ve got an internet connection in my hotel room (new this year), and visiting Google.com I get redirected to: Google Cuba!

2. Richard M Stallman is here, speaking at th 3rd International Workshop on Open Source Software

3. The Venezualans and Chinese are here in force: Venezuala has a super-cool booth announcing: "Software Libre, para una Nacion Libre", with great images of the Linux Penguin and some not-so-subtle Venezualan oil tankers (see main image with this story… droplet ain’t water)

Registration was a tedious 3-queue affair (once to sign in, once to pay, once to collect bag, but I’m jazzed up for the main event(s).

I hope to post daily from my personal blog page, linked below. I’m representing several OU ‘strands’ here: not only KMi in Health Informatics (we have nearly a dozen projects in that niche!), but also OpenLearn, LabSpace, and our EU-funded ELeGI project. So I’ll be speaking in more than one strand, and attending lots of others…

Here’s the conference list, and a link below to the main site and my blog.

VI International Congress on Health Informatics

12th Congress of Informatics in Education

4th International Symposium on Tele-Education and Lifelong Learning – TelEduc 2007

3rd International Workshop on Open Source Software

8th Iberoamerican Seminar on ICT Security

3rd International Seminar on Telecommunications

2nd International Congress of Bioinformatics and Neuroinformatics

3rd International Workshop on Quality of Information and Communication Technologies

2nd Business Meeting about Information Technologies and Communications

5th International Congress GEOMATICA 2007

3rd International Congress of Technologies, Multimedia Content and Virtual Reality