Call to Arms June 8, 2010
Posted by tumaix in planetkde-tomazcanabrava.trackback
The vacation period for brazilian universities is approaching, and as usual since last year the KDE – Brasil team is proud to invade all nearby universities for a quick chat with students. But not a father-to-son talk, we are invocking them to our army, and how?
We have a bunch of presentations in our resource page that anybody can use to help ( however, all of them are in portuguese ).
But What’s the plan of KCall To Arms? Gather Students to hack on KDE? Hell no, too fast for that, KDE is not widely used in Brasil, because *nix is not widely used in brasil, so the first thing is to show the students and professors that they can have better working tools by using it.
I’m gonna invade two universities next week ( Federal University of Santa Catarina and State University of Santa Catarina ) Showing the KDE – Sdk package and a bunch of tools from the KDE – Edu. Not just me. there are also a lot more universities being invaded right now:
- IFBA: Federal Institute of Bahia, invaded by Sandro Andrade
- UFBA: Federal university of Bahia, invaded by Sandro Andrade
- Faculdade . Pedro II, Bahia, invaded by Sandro Andrade
- UFSC: Federal University of Santa Catarina, invaded by Tomaz Canabrava
- IFSC: Federal Institute of Santa Catarina, invaded by Tomaz Canabrava
- Univali: Santa Catarina, invaded by Tomaz Canabrava
- Ulbra: Invaded by Wagner de Melo Reck
- Fatec: Invaded by Camila San Martin Ayres
- UFMG: Federal University of Minas Gerais, Invaded by KDE – MG Team
- UFPI: Federal University of Piaui, invaded by Francisco Fernandes
- Centro Universitário Toledo, invaded by Cochise
- UNIP, invaded by Cochise,
- Centro Universitário Salesiano, invaded by Cochise.
Not all of those universities are invaded yet, some will be in the near future ( 1 to 2 weeks ), and a few more are being prospected for invasion. I will update this as soon as I have more universities or pictures of the invasions. =)
Live Blue 
Morning Tomaz
I always thought the more than 50 million students or pupils in Brasil use *nix and KDE? Was this a misinformation? Because you tell us that not many people in Brasil use KDE…
Greets from Switzerland
More than 50 million students in Br uses KDE in government schools. In Brazil government schools are (usually) not good schools, they are trying to improve it by using open source software and capaciting more Teachers, but in the meantime good schools are private ones, and those don’t use Free Software, and aslo Universities don’t use, don’t care and do not want to know about Free Software and KDE in general. That’s why we are doing those invasions, showcasing KDE to professors and studants that are usually only working with windows that there are alternatives, and in most cases, a better one.
Hi, Mario. Twenty years ago roughly 2% of students that started school reached the university in Brazil. Nowadays this number is a lot bigger, with some studies showing it is up to 20%. But most of these are really not great universities, and usually private (and not free).
The population that is in the university today grew up in schools with no computers, or with a few Windows machines on the lab in the case of the more expensive private ones. The public school system did not have computer labs until very recently.
So in the future I think the generation that is using KDE and Linux today will carry this habit to the universities, but for now proprietary software dominates the CS field. Almost all universities that have computer science courses have MS and Sun “embassadors” and evangelists, and these companies have donated tons of software licenses to graduate students as well. In the university where I do my masters (in games) I could (if I want to) get free licenses for all MS products for academic usage, for example. Of course this translates into professionals that carry on using .Net and Java later 😉 Tomaz’s effort is an attempt to bring a little bit of free software to these hostile environments.
Let me know if anyone is planning to do anything in Itajubá, MG. I live close, but my Portuguese is not good enough to do anything on my own. But I might be able to help if anyone else is going there 🙂
There is the KDE-MG team, don’t know if they are near Itajuba, can you get in contact with them using their list-mail? geral@listas.kde-mg.org
thanks =)
wow ! Impressing effort 🙂
good luck
Nice effort, this. 🙂 We have been doing something proactive in Kerala – India also over the last few years.
I’m from Kerala, India and in our state all government systems are being systematically converted to Linux. That includes all schools and colleges – step by step. I feel that it is giving returns even though, as you say govt. schools aren’t the best. The simple fact that you can create things using a Linux system – if you are unhappy with something is an attraction to many and a culture where the first big investment parents make for their kids is a 2nd hand computer.
So I hope I think Govt. schools in Brazil can also bring out some good hackers in time…
[…] long before Akademy Tomaz told me about the awesome Qt/KDE courses he and his team are giving at Brazilian universities to a few hundred students each. (They […]