ICOS10 Day 1

ICOS10 Opening Day

Today, September 17th, 2010 marked the 10th annual International Conference on Open Source (ICOS) opening ceremony for its distinguished invited guests from various sectors of the FOSS community. The NGO Track for development began with a presentation on Open Source Dissemination Strategies for Belize and Central America moderated by Ms. Joy Tang, Founding Director of oneVillage Foundation, Ghana .

The keynote speech was given by Kieran Ryan, Director of Department of Computer Science at Sacred Heart College, Belize. This presentation gave a history of the FOSS movement in Central America. FOSS could play a role in contributing to the education system by working with NGO's to promote distributed learning centers in rural areas of Belize. The strategy for FOSS in Central America was compared to the successful dissemination of FOSS in Brazil. A discussion followed the presentation on the topic of how Brazil succeeded in implementing Open Source in their communities and how Central American could follow in Brazil's footsteps.

Ms. Tang, the moderator, ensured that the audience participated and contributed with insights of their experiences that shed light on the questions posed in the talk. Ms. Tang also asked significant questions that when answered could lead to important steps being made in coming up with FOSS dissemination strategies in developing countries.

Professor Chao-Kuie Hung, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of Information Management, from Chaoyang University of Technology, shared issues he has dealt with in assisting rural communities in Taiwan bridge the digital divide using open source. His concept of using bootable USB flash drives with FOSS most definitely can play a role in disseminating FOSS in Central America.

Mr. Alvin is an inspiring teacher from Keelung who has implemented 100% adoption of FOSS on computers in his school. His working knowledge of the issues associated with FOSS dissemination in education was very useful and relevant. Mr. Alvin is living proof that FOSS can be successfully be adopted in the school system.

Thank you to Mr. Apple, our friends from Indonesia, and to all the attendees of the presentation for their attendance and contributions.