I was there and I enjoyed the presentations. It was good, we need more like this in guyana , although I didnt get to stay at the end for the last presentation. Thanks.... We wanna educate ppl about Open Source softwares and see the potential websites and other software have. Like my site www.guyanajobsearch.com. Hope to see more events like that one !!

just wanted to say thanks for inviting me to your software fest... i found it very informative and it has left me thinking lots about how i can use knowledge gained from the programme to enhance the type of wrk i do here ... when i first visited drupal i was totally lost, the site was like information overflow' lol... getting some oral presentations on it has clarified the 'mess' in my head.

everything so nice....few people...my questions and courage...unbelievable.... very good workshop...really really interesting..now i want drupal website

Jud was at NCERD at 8:30 and turned on the AC, on this hot day, AC was very welcome never mind the grassroots approach to SFD, and in many parts of the world grassroots does not mean AC.

On Tuesday 14th, at the Central Corentyne Secondary School, we had nice breeze coming in the room. Deon brought his DSL modem so we were able to have Internet.

Eugene came first , at about 9:25, early he said so he could collect the freebies. Balloons were being inflated by mouth.

Flyers had to be folded by Deon, Eugene showed him how to do it faster. Deon also loaded up the Elive CDs. People started trickling in and the room started looking small and the chairs looked not enough. We were never sure what numbers since the publicity was a bit uncertain.

Michael, Sebastian and Syed arrived from Berbice, quarter to 10, as always, those arriving from far arrive early.

Two Bishops' old students, one a retired teacher and the other a frustrated user of the other operating system.. At 10am, yep, 10am we had enough people to start. Freebies were laid out . Some other UG students came.

Teeshirts had been given to Malisa, Jud, Michael and Deon. The Beijing LUG was responsible for sharing out the supplies and it was amazing how quickly they reached Guyana. We had badges, balloons and stickers and the Ubuntu CDs. We also had 40 TTCS OSSWIN CD and thanks to Guyana Net for donating some and to Dominic who also had a donation which we will use for Berbice.

Raval came early, with his camera all ready to do the photography.

Tux was positioned at the head of the table.
So.. we thought we would start with Stephen Fry's movie in .ogv format. and Michael and I proudly showed people our desktop, how easy it was to navigate, and then .. with the 20 people or so watching , something with that .ogv format and our video cards, because a nice black window showing on the screen where the video should be. I asked Michael to switch the overhead off, so we could fiddle, he said no, this is about open source, let the people watch us try to sort out this video problem. We gave up, what a start!

The first presentation was about FOSS, and software freedom day, and there was discussion about the use of formats, matters pertaining to the amount of technical skill required and if there was anything which ordinary people could use.

More people started coming in, and it was standing room only! Michael opened up his presentation on Ubuntu, showing Open Office, and he did his presentation on the advantages of Ubuntu, with the nice references to the other operating system which is commonly used.

There was a lot of discussion and questions about ease of use, what a desktop looked like, what kind of applications were available and using Wine to run some other ones. Michael was a very convincing advocate for Ubuntu, and next week a home user will do an installation to replace her machine with the other operating system.

We had a stand up and stretch break, while people looked at the
distributions - elive, ubuntu, and then someone had a Suse (yep, I know, not sure if it had been paid for)

Frank's presentation on the Guyanawiki was good, since many had never heard of wikis and there was a lot of discussion about content and how it would be managed. People were concerned about accuracy and correctness and were not impressed at the idea of too much editing. Frank explained how the wikis worked. He also had a treat with this 1MB Werkkzeug (yes German, you guessed right) programme which did the animation for some of his work.

Malisa presented on Moodle, and explained what online learning was about and the advantages of Moodle. She had a video (not in .ogv format fortunately) which showed some of the features.
Persons were interested in how the content would be managed, and the experiences from other countries which Guyana might learn from when implementing e-learning.

At different times during the day, reporters from Chronicle, Guyana Times and Stabroek News dropped in.

Andrew did an interactive session about Linux and the various security issues which Linux could handle. I missed parts of this presentation. Raval and I did the Drupal presentation, Raval has been customising parts of his site There were questions about content management and how CMS are installed and organised.
There were questions about how to do the customisation.
Some of the main questions came from a Joomla! user, so this was an interesting to and fro. We however, had to stop, it was 3:30, one hour past our closing our time and we were hungry.

We estimated that there were about 50 to 60 persons who dropped in and out of the room during the day - and that was enough given the size of the room. All the CDs have been distributed. Some were teachers, technical support people, students, and people who were generally interested and had questions to ask.

Raval had lots of pictures, and we have none of him unfortunately,

Click here for the pictures

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About Software Freedom Day
Software Freedom Day is a global grassroots event held to raise awareness of the benefits of free and open source software, and of using open standards for computer systems.

Presentations starting at 10:00am


What is Software Freedom, and implications for Guyana

Presented by DevNet, an NGO in Guyana which promotes the use of free and open source software.

Introduction to Ubuntu, a popular distribution of Linux for human beings (as opposed to nerds and geeks)

Presented by Michael Dabydeen, a PC/LAN Administrator who has become an avid user of Ubuntu after knowing nothing about it

Using Mediawiki to produce an online Guyanese encylopaedia - The Guyana Wiki

Presented by Frank Schanzenbächer of Rocket Information Technologies. The GuyanaWiki is Guyana's first open source project which distributes content under the Creative Commons License.

Using Moodle to deliver education online in Guyana

Presented by Malisa Richards, IT Teacher from Kurukuru Co-operative College (KKCC). Malisa learnt Moodle as part of the project by KKCC to deliver some of their courses online.


Security issues and Linux

Presented by Andrew Mancey, a Systems Administrator with over 10 years of experience with Linux.

Using Drupal to build dynamic websites

Presented by Vidyaratha Kissoon. Drupal is a content management system which offers rich features to people who would like to own and manage websites.. Presentation case references to RavalOnline and the Roman Catholic Diocesan Youth Office




While stocks last, we will be distributing free Ubuntu CDs and the Trinidad and Tobago Open Source Software for Windows CD which has over 100 free and open source programmes.