The office we work at is a shared space, comprising of a Storage Integrator company called The DatalifeCycle Company, and a Travel company called EarthWalk and Fractalio Data (That's us). Most people working in all these 3 places have been using GNU/Linux, without understanding the philosophy behind using GNU/Linux. The engineering team at Fractalio Data, were a set of Free Software enthusiasts and we thought we should make people aware of the reason behind why GNU/Linux exists and they are not using it just because it was available for a zero cost.

As a first step, we started with the topic Free Internet. So why did you talk about Free Internet when you concept was Free Software. The reason was, the people here were from various background, and for them understand the concept of privacy and the real reason why free software need to exist, would be a little hard to understand. So we just thought we would introduce them to the privacy issues of the internet, which might actually help them to understand the underlying problem, and them with a series of talks we could move towards a fully free software or rather towards a free society.

This talk, we basically introduced them to what is Internet, what are big corporations, and how each of them are trying to control the internet that we use. Talking on corporate and government survilence, and also exposing them to a few things that facebook and google does with the data that they collect. The talk went on showing a few real usecases on how our data is being misused for more personalised advertisments, talking examples of flipkart.com and myntra.com ad's , and also a basic overview of facebook and google's ad mechanism. The talk ended suggesting them a few alternatives to the basic internet application they use, and ended with a QA session.

The presentation I had used is available to download here.
Download the presentation
The presentation also contains notes for each slide, referring what links the people can refer to understand more about what each slide talked about. The slide is also to be circulated to everybody who works at all these offices.

Psst ! To view the notes, download and open the presentation in Libre Office, and click on notes in the slide view.

Image gallery

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Next Steps:

* We have decided to short talks in more decentralised small groups,
in helping them get started with better internet tools, like DuckDuckGo, Diaspora, Cryptocat etc.
* We have decided to create small office level groups on Telegram,
so people would not complain , none of my friends are on telegram, so why should I use it.

A special thanks for Free Software Foundation Tamilnadu(FSFTN http://fsftn.org/), for the stickers and swags that we used for distributing to the participants.

Note : Feel free to add more notes to the presentation and share it back, so that we can use the knowledge and information that we have missed and you have, to share amongst ourselves.