Open Source Government: Lazio e-Citizen, secretly open source compatible
epractice.eu, the portal created by the European Commission offers a service for the professional community of eGovernment, eInclusion and eHealth practitioners, reported about Lazio e-Citizen, a digital inclusion project.
The programme responded to European directives on the Lisbon Strategy and its objectives were to increase the residents’ awareness of the importance of digital literacy, the benefits that e-skills bring to their personal and professional lives, and to fight against social exclusion. The project developed a strategy to bridge the digital divide based on specific criteria: gender, age and skill levels.
Don’t be a secret keeper by *Drangongly*
I asked Alessandra Devitofrancesco (ECDL foundation), author of the Lazio e-Citizen case reported on epractice to tell me more, and she kindly put me in touch with the AICA (ECDL member) responsible of the initiative, Pierpaolo Maggi.
He explained me that the project has been developed using the open source course management system Moodle, and that the portal is accessible also through Firefox and Netscape. On the contrary the article on epractice and also e-citizen FAQ report (bold emphasis is mine):
The schools, universities and Permanent Territorial Centres which were involved in the Lazio e-Citizen project were chosen according to different technological requirements:
- Availability of one or more rooms with at least 12+5 desks and Internet access (ADSL or wireless)
- LAN network among all desks and shared printer
- PC Pentium 4 (or superior) or equivalent (i.e. AMD)
- Windows 2000 or later versions
- Browser: Internet Explorer 6.0 or superior
- Accessories: audio set and headphones: CD ROM reader, minimum video resolution SVGA 800×600
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.
Roberto Galoppini, and 
Gen Kanai 5:10 am on June 23, 2008 Permalink
Roberto, thank you for this news. I’m glad to hear of Lazio’s turn to OSS like Moodle. It would be even better if the Lazio e-Citizen effort was fully OSS, to include compatibility with Mozilla Firefox which would make it usable on any OS (Mac OS, Win, Linux.)
If Pierpaolo Maggi is interested in speaking with any of the Mozilla Italia community, I’m sure they would be interested in helping e-Citizen’s software work on Firefox.
http://www.mozillaitalia.it/
Roberto Galoppini 7:40 am on June 23, 2008 Permalink
Hi Gen,
thank you to join the conversation. Pierpaolo wrote me that it works fine with Mozilla, but he didn’t tell me on which OS. I will forward him your kindly offer.
][ stefano maffulli » Moodle ripped off, should switch to Affero GPLv3 11:07 am on June 24, 2008 Permalink
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