Libre Software Meeting and our working group sent an invitation to the UNESCO Director General, M. Koïchiro Matsuura, to present the Free Software community and give him copies of some of our work (The AbulEdu, Debian and GNU projects to be more precise).
We got an answer from Abdul Waheed Khan, UNESCO Communication and information department, telling us the Director General wasn't available at this date (answer in digital version and snail mail scan). So UNESCO was represented by M. Abdoulaye Diakité.
"UNESCO has always supported the extension and dissemination of human knowledge and recognizes that, in the domain of software, Free Software disseminates human knowledge in a way proprietary software cannot do. UNESCO recognizes also that the development of Free Software encourages solidarity, collaboration and voluntary community work amongst programmers and computer users."
A round table took place with the participation of Anne Ostergaard from SSLUG (Denmark), Philippe Aigrain from the European Commission, Abdoulaye Diakité from UNESCO, François Pellegrini from ABUL as chairman and Benoît Sibaud, coordinator for our project on the scene, as well as many LSM participants in the audience. Sébastien Blondeel acted as translator.
Round table pictures:
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640x480 60 kBJean Peyratout gave M. Diakité copies of French distributions AbulEdu and Debian Éducation for education, Loïc Dachary a Debian CDROM set and Richard Stallman a copy of the GNU project.
CDROM gifts pictures:
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738x542 42 kBThen Benoît Sibaud did a presentation of our working group, its objectives and progress. Slides "Libre software, Patrimony of mankind in English".
Presentation pictures:
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640x480 72 kBThe presentation was followed by a speech from Mr Diakité and a discussion about Free Software and World Heritage.
LSM organisation (thanks to Alix Guillard) produced a press release.
Mr Diakité official report is available on the UNESCO free software portal.
