As we have heard from many researches and personal testimonies from this nation-wide country, access and use of tics in brazil it is still a very limited reality. The numbers vary a lot from state from state, but one pattern is perceived: most of the Brazilian population (those who earn less then r$500 a month) only represents 3% of the people connected to the internet, mostly using computers from public telecenters and school labs. 87% of the brazilian net users are from a higher-income family. (1)

state distribution of brazilian net users:
Distrito Federal 31% (center-west/capital of brazil)
São Paulo com 27% (southeast)
Curitiba tem 23% (sount)
Porto Alegre 21% (south)
Salvador 18% (northeast)
Fortaleza 8%. (northeast)

One of the few researches that address women in this complex scenario obviously focus on that big chunk of net users. At the Brazilian Computing Society site, we find that the low number of women that begin to study Computing in universities is getting even smaller. Basically from 30% of women 15 years ago today they represent 5% of the university students. (2)

Even thought there is a great suppport from the brazilian government - specially at the federal level, also with great national disparities, as usual - plus a very strong, creative and autonomous civil society movement supporting, experimenting and using free software, during the last latin american free software forum (3) there was only 2 proposals from the 479 speakers to talk on gender issues from 27 countries - a major track fo the encounter. None from Brazil. Giving the reality that women constitute 51,2% of the population, we begin by asking: what strategies should we use to find these women?

/etc-br is encounter-convergence of women that are thinking, experimenting and appropriating critically from a diverse of media technologies. we know we are few, but we struggle to give visibility and promote spaces for learning and sharing, having a focus on gender issues or co-laborating alongside other women, we organize ourselves by afinitties more than identities, gathering at a given place to play, study, conceptualize and celebrate the retaking of technology.

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/etc-br discussion list (portuguese) -> http://systerserver.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/etc-br
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(1) http://www.jornaldaciencia.org.br/Detalhe.jsp?id=39303
(2) http://www.agencia.fapesp.br/boletim_dentro.php?id=6583
(3) http://fisl.softwarelivre.org/8.0/www/