Flisol Porto Alegre 2026
On July 25, 2026, we took part in Flisol – the Latin American Free Software Installation Festival, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at Faculdade e Escola Técnica Alcides Maya.
Description
Flisol takes place simultaneously in several Latin American cities, aiming to discuss and promote the use of Free Software through talks and workshops. We brought our experience with Rede Ecovida's digital ecosystem (ecovida.org.br), with a focus on Speco, a system built between 2022 and 2025, when it went into production. For the first time, members of Rede Ecovida — Jovana and Cristiano — and of Tekoporã — represented by Jovana — took part in this space for exchange and learning.
We consider these spaces extremely important for exchanging knowledge and experiences, and above all for strengthening the networks working toward free and sovereign systems. We had the chance to hear very relevant experiences, meet new people, and make connections.
Our talk
Our talk was very well received and sparked a lot of dialogue and questions from the people there, many of them wanting to learn about the Organic Certification side of things and who's behind the system. They were glad and impressed that we use Python and that we built the system in a participatory, community-driven way. This exchange was very rich and important for making new connections with people aligned with the same goals.
Other talks
We also had the chance to attend other talks and learn a bit more about this world, with sessions on education, on valuing and humanizing the work of the people who sustain these projects, on the LibreOffice suite, on AI, among others.
We watched the talk by professor Paulo Schopf (@pschopf), from Instituto de Educação in São Leopoldo/RS, who managed to migrate the institute to the Linux operating system. He shared his rich experience in raising awareness and educating others, since the system they had been using was generating high costs and licensing pressure. He noted that there was a lot of rejection, distrust, and apprehension at first, followed by acceptance and stability — leading to the reflection that the biggest challenge was never Linux, but changing habits.
We had the pleasure of meeting Glória Barboza (@labarboza), who is part of Cumbuca Dev, a project aimed at promoting diversity and equality in tech through educational programs built around open source methodology. We also met Gustavo Pacheco (@gbpacheco), from the LibreOffice community, who shared his experience working with this free and open suite of applications for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, databases, and mathematical formulas — a global community that, in his words, works through collective intelligence, which welcomes you, unlike artificial intelligence, which discards you.
Conclusion
It was a great pleasure to be with this group and, above all, to share our work experience at Tekoporã and at Rede Ecovida de Agroecologia. All these connections remind us that we're aligned with the same purpose as the free software movement: building safe, autonomous relationships with people and developing open, decentralized technologies in a communal and fair way.
May we keep developing local and regional technical skills and expand our reach nationally and internationally, with the goal of encouraging new contributions to the Speco community.