Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

No, even though today is the day that the wonder-child of Apple shows off his latest marketing blitz, this blog is not about Steve Jobs and his DRM-laden tablet.

Instead we are going to travel thousands of miles to the south-east and visit a man in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Marcelo Balisteri, of who most people do not know.

Marcelo was born in the favela, the Brazilian term for "slum", but since he and his mother were poor, Marcelo had to learn to be an "entrepreneur", and to make money any way he could. While sometimes this leads to drugs and theft, in Marcelo's case this lead to computers and Free Software, to the point where he created his own company.

Marcelo found Project Cauã through my blog, and sent me a link a video he made. Watching the video, I immediately saw a connection between what he was doing and Project Cauã.

In this world financial crisis (and it is a world crisis, with some countries being hit harder than others), there are a lot of people without jobs. Government welfare is not the answer in most cases. Useful job creation and training for those jobs is the answer.

Project Cauã has many focal points, including reducing strain on the environment through better design, making computers easier to use through better support, and trying to solve the Digital Inclusion problem. However, one of its strongest points is trying to create millions of new high tech jobs by enabling people to become System Administrators and start their own businesses. More importantly, to try and help people who are on welfare because they lack the training, or because they are single parents who can not afford to leave their children at home alone, or they are physically challenged and can not leave their homes. We believe that all of these people could, if properly trained and given some support, do a good job. We had planned on incorporating that concept from the beginning, but Marcelo's video strengthened that vision.

I have invited Marcelo to participate in Project Cauã, and we will be setting up plans to incorporate some people from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro as well as Sao Paulo into the pilot projects that we will be doing to prove the concepts of Project Cauã.

Carpe Diem.

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