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torpor asks: "Has anyone on Slashdot ever stepped off of the grid? I don't just mean long yuppy vacations to pacified islands, but seriously gone from 'tech-dedicated' to 'doing my own thing in the middle of nowhere for a while'. It's that time of year again. I've killed my TV, and I'm finding myself looking for adventure and mayhem in distant quarters. Have any of you ever done this, and returned with interesting stories to tell?"

cynical writes "WorldChanging has a new interview up with Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Geekcorps, fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and editor of BlogAfrica, the best source of access to African bloggers around. Zuckerman talks about the growing role of blogging in the developing world, fighting corruption and censorship online, the emerging world of "social source software," and a lot more. It's a long, wide-ranging conversation; clearly, this guy is thinking big about the power of the web, especially outside the United States."

Officially, the theme of this year's Open Source Software Convention (OSCON) 2003 is "Embracing and Extending Proprietary Software," and to that end approximately 1,500 attendees (and companies including Apple, Active State, online book-seller Powells.com and MySQL) are sharing space in three floors of Portland's downtown Marriott, and will until the conference's close on Friday. (Representatives from Microsoft are along for the ride, too. Lunch on Wednesday is Microsoft's treat.) An unoffical theme of ubiquitious connectivity and creative collaborative in much in evidence as well: besides the conference-furnished wireless access points throughout the classroom area, numerous other base stations (like the one I'm connected to right now) have popped up. What do you expect with more than a thousand laptop-toting programmers in one hotel? There's also a "semi-unofficial" wiki (applauded by Tim O'Reilly), an ongoing web log of the conference, and an irc channel filled with conference attendees. Read on for more.

The goods: Commercial vendor booths have been fork-lifted in and assembled throughout the course of the day in the lowest of three convention floors, but OSCON's company-sponsored exhibit booths are likely to be low-key and informative, not the glitzy schwag dispensaries of LinuxWorld Expo. (Added to which, the exhibits will only be up six hours on each of Wednesday and Thursday.)

Tutorials and other information-heavy sessions are the core of OSCON; attendees who have paid (or had their employers pay) more than a thousand dollars to attend a five days of tutorials and conference sessions are understandably serious about actually learning things.

I stopped in on one such serious session this morning, "A Day of Extreme Programming" taught by the Irish team of Marty Pauley, Tony Bowden, Marc Kerr and Karen Pauley. The instructors skipped over justifying the methodology of Extreme Programming, and instead immediately launched into a short, funny demonstration of multi-programmer iterative debugging before splitting the 30-or-so attendees into three programming teams for the rest of the day, each team coordinating its efforts using provided CVS servers to work for a simulated client (Karen Pauley, a manager in real life) with a nethack-style game to improve.

Marty Pauley drew some laughs by pointing out the "high-tech project coordination system" he had purchased in anticipation of the all-day session, which he said had cost about $14 in for the whole group. At this, he pulled out several packs of index cards, a plastic case to house them, and some rings to bind smaller collections of cards. "Forget about Gantt charts, every aspect of the project goes on an index card."

Cheap, not necessarily dirty. Pauley's Index-cards and CVS make a decent capsule of the whole conference: there's a definite leaning toward the practical, get-things-done-cheap aspect of open software rather than appeals to the importance of sharing emphasized by Richard Stallman's Free Software movement. OSCON features dozens of sessions and tutorials emphasizing the efficiency, standards compliance, and low-cost of source-available software, with just a few sessions touching on underlying philosophy or licensing. In one session yesterday, for instance, Free Software Foundation executive director Bradley Kuhn talked about the GNU General Public License as it applies to managers as well as to coders.

This doesn't mean that attendees aren't interested in philosophical underpinnings or changing the world -- more likely it's simply that in summer 2003, most programmers who would show up at an event like this have already wrestled with and come up with their own conclusions about software openness, including what licenses or license types they're comfortable using.

One indicator of the Open-vs-Free pragmatism at OSCON is the prevalence of Apple laptops running Mac OS X; Apple's OS may be the best poster child right now for the pleasing results possible in a mix of open source with proprietary software. One tutorial room I looked in on 22 attendees using Intel laptops, most of which were running graphical desktops on Linux or BSD, and 6 with PowerBooks running OS X. I note a similarly high proportion of OS X machines being used around the conference floor when hundreds of attendees swarm out of conference rooms at each break between sessions.

Changing the world, one press release at a time. A handful of interesting announcements have come out during the convention so far. Among them: MySQl and PogoLinux have announced a joint project, a turnkey database appliance running MySQL on an Intel based box. ActiveState (makers of well-regarded IDEs for Python and Perl, among other things) will show an alpha release of Komodo 2.5, the latest iteration of their IDE for programming in Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl and XSLT. Many more such announcements are likely after the exhibit hall opens tomorrow morning.

Not everything at OSCON is about helping businesses produce more virtual widgets per square inch, though -- the sense of collaboration isn't limited to downtown Portland. Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Tripod, and now founder of Geekcorps, will talk Friday on Geekcorps' efforts to bring digital independence to poor countries; he and several other geek activists took part today in a by-invitation roundtable discussion about spreading good through technology, and will be speaking together in a press conference tomorrow on the various ways computers and other high-tech tools can be used to promote prosperity worldwide.

Viva la revolucion! At a conference about extending and embracing proprietary software, the SCO-initiated legal fight over UNIX copyrights is surely on the minds of many attendees, but readers who have grown tired of the ongoing drama will be pleased that there's been little buzz here among attendees about SCO's legal actions. Is it because SCO's suit against IBM is simply irrelevant, or because most people are withholding judgment until SCO actually points out the code the company objects to? SCO is not forgotten, though: tomorrow afternoon, Bradley Kuhn, Chris DiBona, Alan Nugent and Lawrence Rosen will discuss the SCO case in a session called The IP Wars, which ought to get some blood pumping.

In the meantime, conference attendees will get to see something more fun and less contentious this evening: status reports on six different open source software projects: Perl (explained by Larry Wall), Python (Guido van Rossum), PHP (Shane Caraveo), MySQL (Monty Widenius and David Axmark), Apache (Greg Stein), and Linux (Theodore Ts'o).

suzipaw writes "Geekcorps founder Ethan Zuckerman, late of Tripod, gets some well-deserved media attention for his good works via an interview on oreilly.com. What he and other volunteers are doing on behalf of developing nations is pretty darn cool. And humbling--makes this first-worlder grateful for a regular power supply."

An anonymous submitter wrote: "Peace Corps Online is reporting on the White House's Digital Freedom Initiative that will place volunteers from the Peace Corps, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco in a pilot program in Senegal where they will leverage nearly 200 cybercafes and 10,000 telecenters to provide opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs. The idea isn't new - David Rothman proposed an Electronic Peace Corps in 1984, the Geek Corps has been doing this kind of work in Ghana for years, and the Peace Corps already has about 1,500 volunteers working in information technology."

MKalus asks: "Looking at what is going on in the world right now and realizing that computers are not everything (yes, there is more than that) I was considering for quite some time now volunteering in an international project. I was looking at institutions like Casa Alianza and Doctors Without Borders but the problem I am facing is that all of these organizations mainly seem to search for volunteers in medical fields and not so much in High Tech Areas. This is, of course, understandable as I don't really think anybody needs a server farm if they don't have enough to eat at the end of the day." Update: 12/03 15:19 GMT by C :MKalus has been reading the comments sent in so far, but had this bit to add: "I am NOT from the US, I am german living in Canada, as such things like the Peace Corps for example are not a viable option."

"Now I am aware of several organisations where you can go for two weeks in a developing country and help on a farm etc. I also remember the Geekcorps but as nice as it sounds to bring the internet in parts of the world who don't have it I don't quite see the sense in it when at the same time thousands of people die everyday.

So here's the question: Is there a geek out there who managed to volunteer for a longer period (6 months to a year or maybe even longer) in a project abroad, something along the lines of those I've mentioned abobe?"

GeekAbroad writes "GeekCorps has sent its second wave of volunteers to Ghana, Africa. The group has re-made Geekhalla where you can read about their experiences (yes, it's a blatant slashcode rip-off). There are a few good writers in the group and lots of new content being posted. Check it out." We had a story last year about GeekCorps.

You may have read about Geekcorps before on Slashdot. They're a bunch of good people doing a bunch of cool things, and it was high time we wrote something about them so that everyone can know what's going on. Click 'Read More' below to read about Geekcorps, and how you can help them push back the digital divide in developing countries.

Ethan Zuckerman, one of the founders of Tripod, felt that he wasn't getting as much as he wanted out of what he was doing. He knew from personal experience that a lot of people had achieved personal gain through the Internet, and wanted to donate money or time to a good cause, but couldn't find one that fit. So, along with now-program director Elisa Korentayer, Ethan decided to form Geekcorps, as a way to take burnt-out techies to developing countries, bringing their expertise to places that desperately needed it. Ethan assembled a team of technical gurus -- and international development specialists -- and started gathering funds to make his dream come true. His strategizing and monetary legwork is about to bear fruit: Geekcorps pilot program is beginning this year in Ghana. The Ghana program demonstrates the Geekcorps approach in a nutshell: the group will dispatch techies from the United States and Europe to developing countries to work with local small and medium for-profit enterprises. They're targeting countries with enough infrastructure to use the Internet for commerce, but where that opportunity goes largely unused.

The six techies to serve in Ghana will work with six businesses that work with information technology, whether they turn out to be cyber cafes or small manufacturers that want to get online. In return for providing these services, Geekcorps will ask each business to commit to social responsibility and community engagement. Geekcorps would ask, for instance, that a cafe offer access services for low and/or free rates to members of the local community. The specialists chosen for the program, likewise, are expected not only to help out these start-ups, but also to provide information technology training for the local community.

Zuckerman recognizes that Geekcorps isn't the only organization to do this kind of work; also in the works is a global database of techies who would be interested in volunteering for their program, so techie volunteers can be farmed out at no cost to other governmental and community-building projects. While there is only so much that Geekcorps can do, they understand that by keeping information free and taking the time to do it right, the benefits will be much greater.

Linux and other Free Software products have been extremely popular in developing countries, for their adaptability and low hardware requirements as much as for the absence of per-seat licenses. Is Geekcorps dedicated to using Free Software solutions? I asked Elisa Korentayer, one of the Geekcorps founders and international specialists.

Elisa: We're pretty dedicated. We're a big fan of Open Source, and we're a big fan of taking advantage of free software. The aspects of the Internet that are incredibly conducive to non-profit, saving-the-world kind of attitudes, we're really into that. Think about it -- What we're doing in human terms is very similar to what Open Sourcing is. We're going into a country and we're saying 'We're going to offer you services, but we're going to ask you to give those services to other people.' We're going to say 'You can have access to this, but you need to provide that access to other people who didn't have access before."

Elisa provides a startling example of the scale of the technology divide developing countries face:

Elisa: One of the sad-but-true facts right now is that the United States government has set a goal to have a computer in every school, in every library, and they're about 90% of the way there. The goal that the United States has for developing countries is for everyone to live within one day's travel of a telephone.

Geekcorps is looking for volunteers to build these solutions in developing countries. However, if you can't get three to four months off of work to volunteer in Ghana, there is still a good opportunity to work with Geekcorps in your off-time back in your local neighborhood.

Elisa: A lot of the other stuff we're thinking about in terms of taking advantage of the Internet is that we hope to have an open channel for our volunteers in Ghana to communicate back to volunteers at home, so other techies can log in from wherever they are to help those in the developing countries."

Companies worldwide claim to make the Internet and computers more accessible, but Geekcorps is getting out there and doing it this summer. Geekcorps needs time, effort and rampant volunteerism, and the opportunity for Open Source and Free Software enthusiasts to get involved is there for the taking.