GPSL and the weekly seminars

Few years ago in my University, a small group of students started getting organized and created the GPSL, Grupo Pró Software Livre, which translates to Free Software Supporting Group. They did lots of nice things, like helping some (non-computer related) departments use Free Software. But since the time the group got in a cycle: first people have lots of plans and ideas, make some of them happen, after that a good deal of inactivity. Being a member since almost the beginning, I was sad to see that every time we needed to build interest all over again. Since last year a few students and I have been working hard to make the group escape that vicious cycle. First we tried a (unsuccessful) big thing, creating our GPSL version of Summer of Code, no prizes included. It didn't work. So we came up with the idea of having Weekly Seminars about Free Software, programming and such topics. Since the beginning of the semester we had six talks, a five-part series about the internals of Linux kernel, given by glommer++ and one double-talk about Pugs and Perl 6, using audreyt++ slides (hopefully one or two more commitbits will be delivered because of this talk... :-). It seems to me that this is working, we have about five new talks schedule for the next weeks and the feedback until now is very positive. Next talk is about anonimity networks, and a specific implementation called Kurupira.