XI Central American Free/Libre Software Encounter, 2019, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala

The Central American Free/Libre Software Encounter is a yearly event where the leaders an active members of different user groups from all Central America meet to share their experiences promoting the use of free (as in speach) software. Community members from Belice, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama traveled for days to participate in the XI yearly encounter.

The community leaders promote the open source and open hardware ideologies, but there has never been a chat about opening data of their transactions. Blockchain’s worth is based on the transparency of it’s data and this year Stuardo Rodriguez, EOS Nation ambassador, participated giving two talks about blockchain.

The first talk was an intro to blockchain in general, how Bitcoin works, how Bitcoin’s software needs to be free source and how, even when the transactions are open for everyone to read, the transactions are anonymous. The conference went a couple of steps further, showing how a transaction “looks” and how everyone could test it on their phones that same day. The presentation ended showing also how blockchain is used for different things, not only monetary transactions, but also to empower free speech movements.

The second talk was a little more advanced. It covered the history of decentralized computing until Bitcoin, and then the evolution to general purpose blockchains like Ethereum and the adoption problems EOS was able to solve. It then presented a new concept of decentralized autonomous communities, or DACs, and how the concept was not possible to do without blockchain. It also presented the idea to implement DACs in free/libre software user groups and how the monetary incentive could help the members in the groups participate more and reward them for their participation.

The event was a success. We all crated new friends, learned new technologies, were able to share our knowledge and learned that we are not alone, that different user groups are dealing with the same problems, like not having funds, or the apathy that dominates new generations. Being able to convene more than 200 scientist and free/libre software developers is not apathy. Being able to organize the event for 11 consecutive years is a sign that the communities are strong. The event ended, making plans for the XII encounter for 2020 in Belice.