The conference on Technological Surveillance and Free Software

Yesterday I attended a conference titled "Technological Surveillance and Free Software", which was organized by the School of Information Technologies of the university where I work. This activity was part of the actions to start the migration to FLOSS in the university.

The speaker showed a clip from one newspaper displaying the headline "State institutions using more free software everyday". This piece of news was published yesterday, too. That was something I did not expect!

Then, the content of the talk became more IT jargon. However, although the conference targeted professionals of librarianship and ITs, the speaker shared some interesting tools that many people can benefit from, especially those who work writing articles: Sironta and Zotero. While the former is a program for collaborating on documents, the latter is an extension for Firefox that helps you retrieve the bibliographical entry of online books, a great tool for scholars and researchers.

It's fun that I got the information about the event from my mother, a non-technical computer user who, some years ago, used to drive me nuts with desperate calls concerning crashes and viruses. Today, she is a happy Pardus user and sends me all the information that she gets about free software events in my country.