Humanitarian FOSS at Open World Forum 2011 – schedule online
September 19, 2011 5:39 pm community, freesoftwareAfter some last minute confirmations, cancellations and other trials and tribulations, I am very happy with the final line-up for the Humanitarian FOSS track at the Open World Forum this year.
We have a range of projects attending and speaking this year which will cover both crisis response (crowdsourcing first responder information, document and information management when it’s most important) and longer term actions (education, sanitation, financing sustainable projects, enabling reconstruction and securing people from persecution).
I’m particularly happy to have Syrine Tlili from Tunisia presenting the role that free software played in the citizen’s revolution in Tunisia this Spring, and Tashiro Suichi to tell the story of the lives that were saved thanks to free software after the tsunami disaster in Japan in March. I also expect Simon Redfern’s presentation on the Open Bank Project to be particularly interesting, in the context of the current financial crisis.
In addition to the track, Laura Walker Hudson has also agreed late in the day to keynote on the topic of “Free and Open Source Software: Serving Humanity” at 17:15 on Friday the 23rd. As project manager of FrontlineSMS, she has a key position at the center of a lot of what goes on in the humanitarian world: SMS is the key means of gathering and sharing information with rural areas of the developing world, and is also the main way people share information during a crisis.
I’d also like to take the opportunity to give a big shout out to Bayor Andrew Azaabanye from the Literacy Bridge project – he was due to speak on the ways Literacy Bridge is being deployed in Ghana, but unfortunately we could not get a visa in time for him to attend.
We will be in the “Paris” room from 1pm until 5pm on Friday September 23rd – I hope to see a lot of you there!
