The last 7th of May I was at the III University Free Software Contest’s final fase. That event is a really interesting and (IMHO) very important for the free software community world in Spain.
The event takes place at several universities in Spain and have this final fase in Seville. In each university, the student that want to participate, have to start a free software project and follow some rules:
- The project must be register in a public forge with public Subversion, wiki, maillist and so on.
- They have to public their progress in a blog, so the people can follow the projects. All the projects’ blogs are syndicated in the contest’s planet.
- They also have more points if they create a community around their projects.
- And, of course, the project must have some kind of free software license.
I’ve have the pleasure and honor to be member of the jury to evaluate those projects and it’s really hopeful to see those young students learning how to develop a project with free software tools and methodologies. And some projects are really amazing and are already in few distributions or even OS.
This initiative is very helpful to the people from the universities who have great ideas, but they don’t know how the community works or even the normal developing tools. You know… sometimes at the universities the knowledge is too much theoretically… At least in Spain.
I have to apologize to the organization because in this edition I didn’t do my duty as a member of the jury. The work, my mess with the mail and the chaos inside of my head… But I have no excuses, really and I do regret no to have evaluated the projects, because there were some quite interesting…
Thanks anyway to all the organization and the rest of the jury. By the way, this event is good for me also because some members of the jury are very good friends (and GNOMErs 
) but living in other places and they come for the final fase so I can meet them 
For example, there are Carlos Garnacho and Alvaro López (alo)
Well, I do hope this initiative will be replicated in other countries because the students learn a lot and after the contest there are always some interesting projects which are free software
