Communism Ahoy!

So, I'm in Kerala right now, which is far less 'developed' than Bangalore and has more trees, more humidity, plus paintings/flagpoles etc around the place for the Communist Party that has been voted in consistently since 1957 (?). It turns out I'm staying with some friends of Kavita and Dinesh, and Dinesh is here but not the Tall Girl or Renee. And it is very barcamp-like - a spare guest house for visitors/meetings/children's playhouses, wifi, lots of conversations all at once.

And last night was Kavita's talk (which has started me off on a few parallel tracks for my thesis), and chats with Tim and a young mathematician studying at NIAS (and anyone else going), and some Bill Bailey standup for Kavita and I since we couldn't find anyone to take us out for a late movie (there are posters around Bangalore for some Kannada movie with a young women in a police uniform - I've decided that I *need* to watch it). Then up at 4 to get here! I'm sure I'm going to fall asleep in a corner sometime soon, but it looks like a good place to do it.

But I guess I should save some blogging for later, since Dinesh found this blog and is now making numerous requests for blogposts (which I will do my best to honour).

*waves*

Calling all geeks

After much effort by the FOSS community, RMS, and some key people within Kerala's government, the state's IT policy now explicitly states that:

"Free and Open Source Software will be used in all government funded ICT
e-Governance projects to the maximum extent possible. Preferential treatment will be
given to FOSS as it enables the knowledge to be used democratically, makes software
accessible to every one and is economical."

So there are a few pretty cool projects happening here, many of them run through SPACE - today we learnt a bit about the IT @ School program to get highschools using FOSS. Apparently over the last year (?) they've got the program running in hundreds of schools, trained all the teachers, and rewritten the textbooks (!). We also looked at Insight, a school where they're teaching blind people to use Orca and Ubuntu to use computers, as well as to train others.

It's all pretty nifty. And they could use help - especially if people are willing to come for a few months (they said four to six months would be a good span of time, and they could help out with accommodation). So if you're thinking of taking a break and doing something new for a while, perhaps you should come hang out here (or at Janastu) for a bit and help out? I think you would have fun.

It's strange being white

Checked out an article in the Economic Times about Barcamp. It's a bit weird to see myself quoted like that - "Ms C..." doesn't feel much like me.

Being white gets you a heap of privileges in most societies (including Australian society), but usually it's almost invisible (one theorist called it something like 'the invisible backpack' of Stuff you carry around with you because you're white). Here it's so blatant. It means I spend a lot of my time here feeling like a jerk, and terribly awkward.