FLISOL 2008 in Lima was good for two reasons

OK so, for those who follow this blog, I went to the FLISOL event here in Lima, or should I say eventS as in the end I was scheduled for a talk on both sides of the city, with a one-hour interval to run from one to the other. The first talk, happening in the Universidad Tecnológica del Perú (UTP) was good because there were non-educational people there, meaning some business people that actually wanted to know about e-learning because their companies are looking into it. 3 contacts left me their business cards, but also mentionned they were really interested, which is the kind of stuff that smells like healthy business. I also met Diego Escalante again (I think he was giving a talk on GNOME, of course, a little bit earlier). It's a small world. The second talk, although moot in terms of business, was really interesting technically. I had to *face* a few Moodle-savvy (not hostile though) that were comparing Dokeos to Moodle. Although I had done some research the day before about the current features set of Moodle, I was surprised that there was so many things that seem to keep them interested in Dokeos. Not that Dokeos is not as good as Moodle, but the products are different and people tending to choose between Moodle and Dokeos initially are generally reticent to open up to the Dokeos advantages (less permissions for the user, a stricter support and development infrastructure, a clearer interface, ...). During the questions/answers session, two of them mentionned a US medic had actually worked on a modified version of the new Dokeos videoconference system to plug it to Moodle, which kind of took me completely by surprise. After more than two hours of research on the internet, I still couldn't find the forum post they were referring to, although I did find a very old thread that was mentionning that someone modified the *old* Dokeos videoconference to make it work with Moodle. Considering the incredible amount of changes that has gone through our videoconference application since then, this isn't really interesting to me... Anyway, so basically the two talks were nice (for me, as a speaker) and I ended up paying 17 soles for a taxi home, which could have been 12, most probably, if I had discussed the price a little more, but in his defense the taxi driver was really good (same driving style as me, actually, so even if it wasn't really good, it felt really good to me).