Kozhikode - National Conference on Free Software and Education

The National Conference on Free Software and Education has been held in Kozhikode, Kerala during the days of 10th-12th of September 2010. The aim of this event was to introduce Free Software to all the academics of the various universities, in India as well as abroad. Hipatia has been one of the main promoter of the event, focusing on the international side of the conference. The team of Guri, in particular, realised the videos of the speaker who endorsed the event from Italy and set up a streaming server, in order to broadcast the live conference.

The various speeches covered many important topics. Before the inaguration and a keynote by Richard M. Stallman, founder of the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation, there was a presentation in Malayalam for non-english speakers by V. Sasi Kumar (SPACE Kerala) introducing Free Software. During the following days several aspect of Free Software were covered: starting from a legal point of view, showing is fundamental importance in education and then showing different kinds of software and their practical use in high level education, including the very important topic of digital divide. Here is the complete list of the speakers:

• Dr. A. Achuthan - Institution Of Engineers - India
• Satish Babu - InApp - India
• Sri Hari C M - India
• Sri Nithyananda Kamat - Calicut IT Initiative - India
• Sri A. Pradeepkumar - MLA - India
• Sri A. Rajagopalan - CSI - India
• Dr. G. R. C. Reddy - NITC - India
• Dr. Sneramkumar - IEEE - India
• Stefano Barale - Hipatia - Italy
• Marco Ciurcina - Hipatia - Italy
• Renzo Davoli - Università di Bologna - Italy
• Dinesh - Janastu.org - India
• Juan Carlos Gentile - Hipatia - Italy
• Luis Gonzalez - U.T.U. Hipatia - Uruguay
• V. Sasi Kumar - SPACE-Kerala - India
• Krishnakant Mane - GNUKhata - India
• Prof. A. R. Meo - Politecnico di Torino - Italy
• Kannan Moudgalya - IIT Bombay - India
• G. Nagarjuna - Horni Bhabha Center - gnu.org.in - India
• Lalitha Prasad - Tata Services - India
• C. K. Raju - Mes - Calicut - India
• Prabhu Ramachandran - IIT Bombay - India
• Diego Saravia - Unsa.edu.ar - ututo.org - Argentina
• Sanjay Shitole - Usha Mitzai Institute - India
• K. R. Srivathsan - Ignou - India
• Richard M. Stallman - GNU.org FSF.org - U.S.A.
• Prasanth Sugathan - Freedom Law Center - India

The complete videos of the conference can be found on our streaming server at this page. You can download them at our Resources page. The final product of these three days coperative work is and important document to ask all the universities to use exclusively Free Software. For broad dissemination the declaration can be found here. Until the 13th of September, the draft of the document can be edited here.