Updates from July, 2008 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

It is time for outing, I publicly invite project’s promoters to disclose the specific technology choice (moodle), how it has been used and, last but not the least, telling people that the portal is accessible to open source.

eAccessibility and eInclusion are definitely also about allowing open source users to access information.

Technorati Tags: eAccessibility, eInclusion, digital literacy, digital divide, moodle, lazio e-citizen, course management system, epractice, Lazio

 
  • Roberto Galoppini 4:57 pm on May 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    European Legislative Observatory: Commission’s Report on Copyright Harmonization 

    The European Legislative Observatory sends to subscribers a list of changes, I found interesting the Commission’s report on the application of Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonization of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society.

    Read the Commission Staff Working Document (PDF). Oddly Italy is mentioned just once, while as far as I know we are having a “sophisticated” approach to the copyright matter.

    Technorati Tags: European Legislative Observatory, Copyright Harmonization, Italian Copyright law

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 5:34 pm on May 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    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

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 9:09 am on April 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Internet Governance Forum: Draft Programme for the 3rd Meeting (Hyderabad, 3-6 December 2008) 

    The third Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting will be held at Hyderabad on the 3-6 December 2008, a draft programme is available and open for discussion. Comments submitted to the IGF Website by 1 May will be reflected in a revised version that will be issued as a conference room paper at the consultations on 13 May.

    1 Introduction

    This paper aims to provide an input into the open round of consultations on 13 May 2008 to discuss programme and agenda for the third meeting of the IGF in Hyderabad. It gives a first draft programme outline, focusing on structure rather than content. The draft programme outline tries to make best possible use of the facilities that are available a..t the conference venue. It also takes into account the fact that participation at the first meetings in Athens and Rio de Janeiro exceeded expectations and that as many, if not more, people are expected to attend the Hyderabad meeting.

    The paper is conceived a rolling document. Comments submitted to the IGF Web site by 1 May will be reflected in a revised version that will be issued as a conference room paper at the consultations on 13 May.

    2 Basic structure for the Hyderabad meeting

    The proposed meeting structure builds on the successes of the Athens and Rio de Janeiro meetings and takes into account the comments made in the stocktaking process, both on-line and at the meetings in Geneva on 26-28 February. As was the case in Rio de Janeiro, the Hyderabad meeting will not be merely repeating the structure of the inaugural meeting, but will have its own character and will go beyond the formats used previously. The informal, interactive multistakeholder format was generally seen as one of the key factors of the success of the first two meetings and should be maintained as a guiding principle. Participation will follow the format used at the previous meetings and all entities and persons with proven expertise and experience in matters related to Internet governance may apply to register as participants.

    The basic format of the previous meetings, with main sessions and workshops, should be maintained. The five broad themes – access, openness, security, diversity, and critical Internet resources – will be retained but not necessarily as themes for the main sessions. The point was made that the general issues had been effectively covered during the previous two IGF meetings and that the sessions in Hyderabad should be more focused.

    Technorati Tags: IGF, Internet Governance Forum, Hyderabad

     
  • Carlo Daffara 2:54 pm on February 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: open source competence centers, OSS adoption   

    OpenTTT, collaboration and new models for open source competence centers 

    It is widely known that despite many significant advantages, “explicit” use of OSS is still not as widespread. One of the many approaches designed to help in overcoming the adoption gap is the creation of “OSS competence centers”, that provide support and knowledge to facilitate open source software adoption.
    (Either JavaScript is not active or you are using an old version of Adobe Flash Player. Please install the newest Flash Player.)

    Creating a competence center may take years, especially when it is necessary to create everything from scratch. But as I wrote in a recent presentation, it may be more efficient to “piggy-back” on top of existing IT incubators or IT districts, leverage what has already been produced in other projects and especially offer mediation as a service, because it is clear from the many surveys that companies need significant hand-holding when performing the first open source migrations. We will test this approach (after several trials) at the FutureMatch event colocated within CeBIT,

     
  • Carlo Daffara 3:19 pm on January 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    OpenTTT days at CeBIT 

    After a quite successful meeting in Rome, (where Roberto was so kind to join and help me) the OpenTTT project will be hosting a matching event within the CeBIT FutureMatch.

    meeting pointMeeting Point by Varf

    From the CeBIT website: “The EU project Open TTT is supporting enterprises in finding, applying and developing the right Open Source Software to fulfill their specific needs. By collaborating with Open TTT the IRC Future Match 2008 has expanded its breadth to include the Open Source Software sector and thus offers a mediation platform for innovative Open Source Software offers and requests.”

    In the past event, FutureMatch organized more than 1200 one-to-one meetings between companies, and it is my hope that a significant number of those in the next edition will be for open source services between OSS providers and end-users. I would like to invite any interested company willing to be there to register at the FutureMatch site; please choose “Open TTT” as “Assisting Organisation” during your registration to receive free entrance tickets for the CeBIT 2008.

    The OpenTTT project is evaluating a novel approach to help in the OSS adoption process, by “industrializing” the matching process between the demand for software with the necessary functionalities and the offer (the whole set of suitable OSS packages). The mediation process is designed to find the best selection of tools and projects that can best match the expressed needs, and then we try to create one-to-one (or many-to-one, when more than one company is interested in paying for modifications or updates) business exchanges between the potential customers and the OSS-based companies that provide support or services on the selected packages. This approach has been tested in several workshops, held in France, Germany, Italy and Bulgaria and will be refined with the results of the FutureMatch event; we plan to leverage our experience to create a standardized approach to OSS mediation, eventually creating a “blueprint” for competency centers based on the OpenTTT model. Maybe this may be the basis for improving existing marketplaces?

     
    • Roberto Galoppini 5:49 pm on February 3, 2008 Permalink

      I enjoyed joining the Italian OpenTTT workshop held in Rome on the 14 th of January, as I found appropriate and interesting Carlo’s speech on open source solutions for horizontal and vertical needs needs.

      Talking about the audience I was disappointed by the small number of attendees joining the conference, and I spoke about that with Martina Desole (APRE agency).

      Martina, who opened the conference talking about APRE’s role and presenting the participation of OpenTTT to Cebit FutureMatch, on the contrary was happy because with 17 attendees they reached the established target (namely at least 4 members for every vertical “club” among Energy&Environment, Industry Production, Transport and Public Administration).

      I don’t know how these targets are defined, but I believe that four participants for each vertical segment are not enough to drive conclusions out of mere assumptions. OpenTTT definitely needs a broader audience to verify and test its OSS mediation approach, let’s see if Cebit FutureMatch could help in this respect.

    • Carlo Daffara 8:46 am on February 4, 2008 Permalink

      The reason for Martina to be happy can be traced probably to the fact that for traditional matching processes 17 attendees can be considered a good participation 🙂
      The project has reached an overall of around 100 companies that were audited, submitted requests, and for which a match was found. In this sense, the number is sufficient to obtain some results, like the fact that there is limited difference in the horizontal requests (across company size and across different countries) and that we were able to match 95% of the requests directly with a single project.
      The biggest problem found is that in Italy (less so in Germany and France) the number of interested OSS companies was quite low, and most were not interested in participating in the matching process. I suspect that here we have a confirmation of Roberto (and mine) hypothesis that Italy has a strongly underdeveloped commercialization channel, and for this reason the market itself is still immature. I estimate that we are 2-3 years behind France in this respect, and probably 5 years away from a “well formed” market for OSS companies.

    • Roberto Galoppini 12:27 pm on February 4, 2008 Permalink

      Carlo I believe that the underdeveloped commercialization channel it is a partial answer, since covers only IT firms. In my opinion vertical needs are potentially interesting for a broader audience, resulting in the ideal match for projects like OpenTTT.

      In my understanding projects like OpenTTT would need an appropriate budget to promote its events, otherwise technical findings could end to be a tool for (few) geeks.

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:03 pm on December 9, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Barcamp: Piublog 2007 

    The fourth Roman barcamp – Piublog 2007 – took place today within the event “Più libri più liberi” (eng.: more books, more freedom), the annual fair of the independent Italian publishing houses, held since 2002. A good chance to meet again old friends or why not make new ones on a gloomy, raining day in Rome.

    Leo Sorge was a very nice host, embarrassed because the venue actually wasn’t totally appropriate for a barcamp, being just a single room and lacking of Wi-Fi facilities. Fabio Masetti opened the barcamp, later Riccardo Cambiassi – who originally “imported” the barcamp in Italy – impressed me with a cool slideshow on barcamping.
    In the afternoon I enjoyed Nicola Mattina on corporate blogging, and Piergiorgio Lucidi introduction to microformats and Semantic Web.

    I spent also time talking with people, among others Antonio Pavolini, Andrea Martines,  Feba, Giulio Gaudiano e Stefano Epifani. I met for the very first time Dario Salvelli and I suggested Nicola Risitano (LSLUG, OpenCamp) to have a look at the Open Source Guide for SMEs. Andrea Genovese was supposed to talk about his coworking project, but eventually Fabio Masetti spoke on behalf of him.

    Technorati Tags: barcamp, piublog

     
    • Riccardo 11:37 am on December 10, 2007 Permalink

      Ciao Roberto!
      È stato un piacere conoscerti. Grazie dei complimenti, immeritati.
      Le slide non abbiamo fatto in tempo ad esplorarle per bene ma le trovi su SlideShare se ti interessano.
      Spero di sentirti presto, fammi sapere quando passi da Londra!

      R

    • Dario Salvelli 2:42 pm on December 10, 2007 Permalink

      Roberto, i’am really nice to met you: i hope to talk more for the next time..

      Ehi, take care!!!

    • antoniocontent 12:45 pm on December 14, 2007 Permalink

      Nice to meet you, and sorry we could n’t spend more time for our chat.

      I wish you a quick recovery!

      Cheers,

      🙂

      a

    • Piergiorgio Lucidi 7:41 pm on February 4, 2009 Permalink

      Thank you for your feedback about my talk during this event!

      Thank you again for your feedback sent to Sourcesense: now I’m working in a real Open Source company 😀

      Ciao
      Piergiorgio

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:50 am on November 20, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Internet Governance Forum: IP Justice Report on line 

    The second Internet Governance Forum (IGF) hosted by the United Nations is officially over.

    The IGF, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from 12–15 November 2007, was aimed to advance discussion on issues related to Internet governance, mainly on the following five themes: Openness, Access, Security, Diversity, and issues related to the management of Critical Internet Resources.

    The best part of IGF 2007 was undoubtedly the various workshops, “dynamic coalition” meetings, and best practice sessions, which were independently organized by the meeting’s participants. The level of quality of the dialogue in many of these sessions was outstanding, with diverse stakeholders coming together to engage on a common topic and present different viewpoints. All of the new ideas discussed at this year’s forum — indeed all discussion of “emerging issues” — came from the independently organized workshops and best practice sessions. As IGF Chairman Nitin Desai put it during the 2007 closing session: like the Internet itself, all the real action at this forum was at the edges.

    In addition to the robust quality of the non-main session discussions, IGF-Rio offered an incredible number (84) of meetings on a broad range of subjects – indeed so many that participants had to choose between several interesting sessions that were scheduled concurrently. But don’t fret: you can still watch or listen to all missed sessions for years to come via the Internet.

    Read the full report at IP Justice Website.

    Technorati Tags: IP Justice, IGF, Internet Governance Forum

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 10:44 pm on November 19, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Internet Governance Forum: Discussions on Open Standards and Access to Knowledge at the IGF 

    RIO DE JANEIRO – Intellectual property-related issues were a topic avoided by governments during the 2003-2005 World Summit on the Information Society, which gave way to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). But at the second IGF in Rio de Janeiro last week there were several IP-related workshops.Organisers of the dynamic coalitions on open standards, access to knowledge and the newly formed coalition on digital education said they were satisfied with the attention IP issues drew.

    David Gross, the United States delegation lead, said he had been interested to see how much IP issues had come up. “IP issues of course are always an important issue,” said Gross, the US coordinator for international communications and information policy. “But there are many other places devoted to that topic, like WIPO [the World Intellectual Property Organization] or WTO [the World Trade Organization]. The fact that people think that the IGF is a place for these issues was interesting to me.” But Gross called it a misused opportunity that issues of the free flow of information had not come up more instead.

    Read the full article at the Intellectual Property Watch.

     
  • c
    Compose new post
    j
    Next post/Next comment
    k
    Previous post/Previous comment
    r
    Reply
    e
    Edit
    o
    Show/Hide comments
    t
    Go to top
    l
    Go to login
    h
    Show/Hide help
    shift + esc
    Cancel