Introducing GNOME in Brazil

[Jonh Wendell <jwendell gnome org>]

Hello all!

I'm Jonh Wendell, from Brazil, GNOME developer taking care of the Remote
Access in the GNOME desktop.

Brazil is a big country, with more than 180M inhabitants. It's also a
big FLOSS consumer, here we have lots of communities around almost all
FLOSS projects.

Our GNOME community is mostly made of translators, but still we have
some developers, artists and promoters of GNOME.

Right now I'm working on increasing the amount of Donations. As a 3rd
world, most people do not own an international credit card, thus making
donations directly to the Foundation a bit harder. I've made a survey
[1] that proves that people would donate if they could to that in a more
"Brazilian" way.

Also we're working with some online stores whom sell GNOME stuff. They
are going to transfer a percentage to GNOME [Brazil]. This is still in
negotiation, so, news on that soon.

Last year, Aparecido Quesada gave a talk [2] at GUADEC about the use of
GNOME in Brazilian "Telecentros". Telecentro is a place where poor
people can use and learn how to use the computer for free, all costs are
paid by the government. All those places have computers running GNOME.

I tried (actually I'm still trying) to contact Quesada so that he could
talk here his experience in those Telecentros, but I didn't manage to
talk to him.

We have here many FLOSS events annually. We try to be present at the
most important ones. Always giving talks showing what GNOME is, how it's
organized and how to contribute. Also, often we have talks showing those
use cases, of environments which run GNOME in their machines.

So, I see GNOME usage and contributions can increase a lot here in
Brazil. It's up to us to encourage people and make our man power to
increase.

Let's share some experience here so that GNOME usage can only improve in
our countries!

[1]-http://bit.ly/bv73hS
[2]-http://www.grancanariadesktopsummit.org/node/216
-- 
Jonh Wendell
http://www.bani.com.br