It's been a while since Asia Source camp at Vishtar in Bangalore. But it remains vivid in my mind. Vivid enough to have kept me in the F/OSS circle to date and to have sustained a number of high tech friends both here and elsewhere, a few of whom I more or less am in touch with.

Not that I'm now programming - I'm not in THAT class. I am happy to say that I'm able to sustain some involvement in advocating it to the NGO world here in the Philippines. First, in our NGO, CMA or the Center for Migrant Advocacy. Since then, we have migrated our two laptops to Ubuntu, including mine, and so my colleague and I have become used to its plusses and minuses hehehe but we are coping, thanks to our techie support based in Darwin and my co-camper Dong Calmada. Our desktop is just waiting for our techie.

I also had the chance to meet up with Stephanie Hankey together with other Asiasource campers when she did some monitoring visit last year. Our two junior staff were also able to learn Open Office courtesy of ISIS, where Pretchie, my co-camper is the System Admnistrator. I have also participated in the F/OSS sessions organized by Foundation for Media Alternatives in was that a Linuxworld something I have to check - where Cheekay, another source camper, shared on Gender and ICT I think? Attended another on FOSS and something about legal and security. Also had a chance on the latest Ubuntu when who was he came to visit.

I also became part not only of two F/OSS e-groups: OSANG and BUKAS but also a member of the evolving BUKAS, together with Pretchie and Dong Calmada, another co-camper.

Immediately after Bangalore where I participated in the GIS session, I promoted this to the Action for Economic Reforms in relation to their project with the European Union on Millenium Development Goals. Two softwares, one for GIS and another for their MDG planning matrix, were both open sourced. In our own CMA, we are just about to start to translate (is this the right term?) our SMS SOS OFW hotline, that we launched last February 14, into open source. My colleague also presented this in FMA's recent workshop on open source advocacy tools for NGOs. Unfortunately, I had to give up my "scholarship" to others because it was in conflict with a forum I was organizing at CMA.

I am now regularly sitting with the evolving BUKAS group. We are in the process of critiquing the government's ICT roadmap and by next week, we shall be critiquing FMA's FOSS and education, FOSS and gender and FOSS and the digital divide. Then we shall be holding a dialogue with the government's Commission on ICT to take up the ICT roadmap and more.

At the same time, I'm able to more or less keep abreast with the goings on with my co-campers here in abroad through the regular updates I get on my e-mail. Thanks. IThis is all to update on myself. I would like to reiterate my thanks to the Asia Source organizers. It was one of the best things that happened to me, despite being technologically challenged.