There is a growing demand in Panama for professionals trained to work with Free and Open Source tools.  Moreover, the lack of them is often cited by institutions and companies as the reason for the low adoption of Free and Open Source solutions.

This situation has motivated the creation of the Bug Squashing Team - BST, an initiative that seeks to engage university undergraduate students on Free and Open Source projects by training them in the areas of debugging, localization and documentation.

In the BST students will acquire skills to participate in Free and Open Source projects, including technical skills (programming languages, debuggers, version control and others) and community participation skills ( governance and communication tools in Free and Open Source projects, and others). 

Once trained, the students will participate in bug squashing sessions once a month.  In these sessions, they will work to repair bugs, translate and document on previously chosen Free and Open Source Projects.  After the sessions, the team leaders will send the work done by the students to the projects for its acceptance.

The BST is an initiative conceived by the local community FLOSS-PA (Free/Libre and Open Source Software Panama), whose members will donate their time to train the students. FLOSS-PA and the Free Technologies Group within the Technological University of Panama formed an alliance to organize the BST and CIDETYS joint as sponsor and providing logistics support.