Thanks to Carlos, Monday night was spent at Guanabara, an excellent Brazillian club in the middle of London (and just around the corner from the office). Organised by a London society called Cybersalon, Guanabara held a fairly decent sized crowd to listen to a couple of guest speakers.

The evening was about demonstrating what initiatives the Brazilian Ministry of Culture were doing that involved OSS. Gilberto Gil, the Minister of Culture, and Claudio Prado, the Digital Policy Coordinator for the Ministry of Culture talked about the hotspot initiative that empowered existing groups to share their culture leveraging OSS on old computer hardware. The Ministry provides free internet and some levels of equipment to enable groups to distribute their cultural activities to a wide audience and delivers education to allow them to do this in a self-sustaining manner.

For me it was a fantastic evening to hear about the different attitude and the compelling reason why OSS is so important to countries such as Brazil. I found it extremely refreshing to hear about the use of OSS from people with completely good intentions and without the excessively strong opinions of some OSS zealots, which can be so offensive at times. I think the key success to the Hotspot initiative is that the importance lies in the value for empowering people, and not the technology.

The evening was topped off by a top performance by Gilberto Gil (who is also a famous musician and has produced songs under the Creative Commons License) and my small part in a table football championship for charity.