ForumPA: Creativity Forum, A Forum for Ideas

ForumPA, the greatest Italian event of and about the Public Administration taking place in Rome from the 12th to the 15th of May, today hosted the Creativity Forum session, chaired by Fiorello Cortiana, representative of the Italian delegation at the WSIS.

Trying to grasp that ideaTrying to grasp that idea by El Buen Matador

ForumPA, the Italian exhibition to meet up representatives from central and local Public Administrations, this year is running also some unconferences, freely inspired by the barcamp phenomenon.

Unfortunately I couldn’t join the unconference from the very beginning, but I really enjoyed Renzo Provedel speech about open innovation, as I liked Stefano Quintarelli gave a very interesting talk on the network infrastructure as a commons. I also enjoyed Guido Scorza telling the audience how difficult is to share creative commons in Italy.

I started my very short speech speaking of the big “news”: free software exists and there is a lot of it. While open source is doubling every year, a very tiny fraction of it is known from the public. Despite Linux or OpenOffice.org are well known – don’t miss my round table tomorrow if you want to know more about OpenOffice.org Italian success – many people totally ignore the existence of a number of valuable open source packages. I mentioned Clam Anti Virus, an effective open source anti-virus whose performances are widely unknown, as resulted also from researches conducted by a student I was advising for his thesis.

Considering the existence of funds to sustain open souce innovation, the new Italian government might consider to launch a “pubblicità progresso” campaign in order to let people know about open source software.

Am I a dreamer? I hope not!

Technorati Tags: open source government, open source dissemination, Italian public administration, pubblicità progresso, guidoscorza, stefanoquintarelli, fiorellocortiana, renzoprovedel