IT in education, House lot utilization, mining permits - Software Freedom Day 2015

2005 Picture, Taran Rampersad - https://flic.kr/p/4HTma
Software Freedom Day  is a day identified to celebrate Free and Open Source Software.  

Guyana has been celebrating since 2004, when the first event was held at NCERD, Ministry of Education with installations of Linux and demonstrations of various tools. There have been events of different intensity every year since then - in Berbice (University of Guyana Berbice Campus and New Amsterdam Technical Institute) and sometimes in Georgetown.

In 2005, the event was held at the YWCA(Thanks Taran for the blog). There were two tracks - the auditorium had presentations and the lab  had the demonstrations and installations.

Software Freedom Day: Sign





In 2015, the event was held at the Herdmanston Lodge on Saturday 19 September, 2015 courtesy of Brainstreet. There were a series of presentations.


2005 - Presentation at YWCA, Brickdam on SFD


Donielle Dundas (Apologies for poor quality of image)

Donielle Dundas , a lecturer at  the Unversity of Guyana Berbice Campus shared her research about using Free and OPen Source Software in Education, specifically schools. Her research had looked at ways of encouraging teachers to access FOSS tools to accomplish 


Naseem Nasir presenting

Naseem Nasir, who works at the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission, talked a bit about the need for IT persons to be able to present good solutions to the management. His main presentation was about a research project looking at how QGIS could be used to show house lot utilization. There was discussion about how 10% of the features of most software packages are used 90% of the time and QGIS was seen as a viable alternative to more expensive options to help with decision making in different sectors like housing and local government.


Roxroy Bollers

Roxroy Bollers is a GIS user. His presentation was about the use of  Open Data Kit. He has used it in some forest conservation related projects  ODK allows users to collect data on mobile phones and then upload to a server. The data can then be processed on other applications. He has worked on projects in Kanashen and other areas which do not have much ICT infrastructure.


Donald Singh
Donald Singh described himself as a surveyor. He did his presentation about Guyana's Geoportal project. This is an inter-agency project in Guyana to share geospatial in the spriit of Open Data sharing. This information includes the information related to mining permits, etc. 
 His presentation looked at the structure of the platform, and the functionality and extensive features for users.
The platform uses a series of free and open source software tools to deliver data, maps and documents to users. The sharing is governed by Guyana's Geographic Information Policy.


Lance Hinds
Lance Hinds, CEO of Brainstreet led a discussion about the different things which are needed to push Information Technology as a viable economic sector in Guyana. This includes the ICT policy, legislation, etc.  There was a promise to arrange a meeting with the E-governance Unit so that there could be further engagement.

 The persons who attended are students, lecturers, GIS specialists,  and persons working in the private and public sectors. Many of them expressed great appreciation for the event.


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