Commercial Open Source Software

The next Focus Group Open Source meeting will focus on Open Data, and it will take place on the 25th of January 2012 in Rome, at IBM’s office (sponsor of the event). Among invited speakers Gianni Dominici (ForumPA), Federico Morando (Apps4Italy), Salvatore Marras (dati.gov), Ernesto Belisario (Italian Association for Open Government),  and Guido Vetere (IBM).

For more information and to sign up for the event, see the Focus Group Open Source blog.

Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, has just thrown a survey to ask to to ask people which standards are most important to them.

If you’re a business or community organisation, helping us choose the right standards will make it easier for you to do business with Government.  It will also help us open up data, better informing your decisions, and hopefully prompting innovation.

We’ve placed free text fields in the survey, so you can tell us what we have missed or which alternative standards you believe may be better.

Apparently the results will be reviewed by the Chief Technology Officers Council and then conclusions will be published on the Cabinet Office website next Autumn.

Couldn’t Italy do the same?

The ePractice Workshop on Open Source Software for Public Administration, supported by the ePractice.eu and the OSOR.eu communities, will be held in Brussels, on Thursday 7 April 2011.

Continue reading ‘Open Source Software for Public Administrations: ePractice Workshop, Brussels 7 April 2011′

The new Italian Law on Digital Administration (codename CAD) has been presented and thoroughly discussed yesterday afternoon at LUSPIO university with Andrea Simi, consultant of the Italian Minister of Innovation, Gianfranco Pontevolpe (DigitPA, formerly known as CNIPA, the National Center for IT in Public Administration) and Fabrizio Bianchi (Assinform, the Italian association of ICT companies).

As anticipated in a previous post, in my opening greetings I made a very brief to the modifications made to reuse’s articles, eventually gathering feedback from the speakers.

Continue reading ‘The Italian Law on Digital Administration and Software Reuse’

All presentations of the event held on the 17th of November to talk about electronic purchase of open source services,  are available at the host’s website (Consip, in the news section).

The event, organized in collaboration with the Open Source Focus Group for Public Administrations, focused on how to use the award-winning Italian Public Administration Electronic Marketplace to ease open source procurement processes.

Talking about transparency, I noticed that for many Eu-funded research projects is considered a  “nice to have”, a sort of secondary requirement, at best. Having been speaking with researchers and commissioners around this topic, I came up with an idea for a different way to look at transparency in future calls. Continue reading ‘EU-funded Projects: Transparency and Beyond’

“EU-funded Projects and Online Dissemination” inspired some reactions, also from one of the Future Networks projects: the SAIL project.

Johan Myrberger - Head of Multimedia Campus at Ericsson - replied to my suggestions with a blog entry around Online Dissemination, an interesting opportunity to talk more about FP7 dissemination do’s and don’ts.

Continue reading ‘EU-funded Projects and Online Dissemination (part II)’

Consip - the Italian public stock company owned by the Ministry of the Economy and Finance and responsible for the rationalization of Public Purchases - is hosting an event about electronic purchase of open source services.

The event, that is part of the Open Source Focus Group for Public Administrations series, will be focuses on how the award-winning Italian Public Administration Electronic Marketplace (MEPA) can ease open source procurement processes.

I look forward to moderate the final round-table to stimulate a discussion about ongoing actions and perspectives.

ICT EU-funded projects during dissemination and exploitation phases conduct both online and presential activities, but most of the times they lack of being relevant in terms of outreach. This blog entry is aimed at giving some basic tips and hints to plan an overall strategy that extends from creating (yet another) website to the metodization of social media activities.

Continue reading ‘EU-funded Projects and Online Dissemination’

The upcoming European Commission Future Networks concertation meeting next week will host an “Open source & Research” panel (agenda), and I’m honoured to have been invited to join it.

Having been writing about EU-funded open source research for a while now - sometimes interacting with running projects, other times helping them to be more visible, but also criticizing some for not being effective or to produce poor deliverables - I am very much willing to address the sustainability aspects of open source projects and the commercial viability of open source from framework programme projects.

Continue reading ‘EU-funded Projects and Open Source’