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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 4:15 pm on June 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government: France beats Italy 4-0! 

    SYSTEM@TIC PARIS-REGION, a competitiveness cluster aimed at developing the local economy and enterprises’ competitiveness, using partnership and training to produce and deliver enabling innovations, just run its third internal convention. Among the five thematic groups, since October 2007 has been included a technology-oriented working group on open source (Logiciel Libre).

    ParisParis, capital du logiciel libre by Koninho

    Roberto Di Cosmo, professor at the university of Paris-Diderot and president of the Logiciel Libre working group, invited me to join the event to learn more about what is going on in the Paris area in the free software arena.

    Francois Bancilhon, Mandriva’s CEO, is the vice-president of the open source thematic group, while in the council are sitting representatives from big firms like Cap Gemini, Bull, C-S, along with people from INRIA, university Pierre et Marie Curie and Nuxeo.

    Roberto explains that the goal of this group is to help structure the open source ecosystem in the Paris area by federating research laboratories, SMEs and big firms through R&D projects, partially supported by public funding in the standard scheme of competitivenes clusters.

    The state played a key role, by providing a framework, the competitiveness cluster, and the funding necessary to catalyze the interest of the actors. On the other side, this framework has been put at work in the particularly fertile ground of the Paris area, that hosts 50% of the ITC R&D of France, with a significant presence of Open Source ISV, a large number of research centers and Universities with IT laboratories, that have a long tradition of contributing to Free Software, and an exceptionally high concentration if IT expenditures.

    Roberto, how System@tic allocates resources to the projects?

    A distinguishing feature of the R&D projects in a competitiveness cluster, is that they must bring together at least two industrial partners and a research laboratory. In the case of our group, resources are allocated in the following manner: 59% SMEs, 26% laboratories, 15% big firms. The projects go through a rigorous evaluation process, first inside the group, then at the level of the cluster, and then in the services of the ministry of Industry, the region, and the departments of the Paris area.

    During the first year public investments sum up to less than five millions euro, less than half of the how much has been allocated for open source software by the Italian budget law last year, this year and next one. Italy is investing more money actually, but it is still unclear how such investments will eventually benefit the IT Italian ecosystem, though.

    Italy is still missing a clear strategy about how to foster the Italian open source ecosystem through training, education, research and outreach, while France apparently has found its own path for developing it.

    Dominique Vernay, Systematic president, during his opening speech congratulated the Open Source group for the speed with which it has started 4 high quality R&D projects, integrating quickly in the Systematic infrastructure.

    Marc Lipinski – vice president of the Conseil Régional de l’Ile de France for higher education, research and innovation – gave a particular importance to the role of this group while addressing the over 400 delegates present in the room, stressing its creation as one of the most significant events in the last year for Systematic.

    During coffee-breaks I spoke with few French open source actors, among others Cedric Thomas (OW2), Ludovic Dubost (Xwiki), Stéfane Fermiger (Nuxeo), Daniel Schaefer (Kalis), but also with open source customers, like Denis Teyssou (AFP) or Marie Buhot-Launay (Paris Region Economic Development Agency), inward investment adviser for ISV companies wanting to invest in the Paris area.

    People had a very positive feeling with regard to the approved open source projects, and looking at projects like scribo is easy to share their thoughts.

    SCRIBO – Semi-automatic and Collaborative Retrieval of Information Based on Ontologies – aims at algorithms and collaborative free software for the automatic extraction of knowledge from texts and images, and for the semi-automatic annotation of digital documents. SCRIBO has a total budget of 4.3M? and is partially funded by the French administration. It brings 9 participants together: AFP, CEA LIST, INRIA, LRDE (Epita), Mandriva, Nuxeo, Proxem, Tagmatica and XWiki.

    Italy beat France on a soccer field, but on the open source ground we have a lot to learn from them.

    Technorati Tags: France, Italy, Open Source Government, ecosystems, DominiqueVernay, RobertoDCosmo, MarcLipinski, FrancoisBancilhon, Scribo, System@tic

     

    • Djordje Lukic 12:08 am on June 24, 2008 Permalink

      Hm… I wonder why the hell Di Cosmo didn’t tell his students about this …

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:55 pm on June 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Italian Elections: The Province of Agrigento has an open source candidate 

    Provincial elections will take place in the province of Agrigento over this week end, and apparently Agrigento has its own best open source candidate, Eugenio d’Orsi.

    AgrigentoAgrigento by Stefano Liboni

    I totally agree with William Hurley, explaining the importance of considering candidates also from this perspective:

    Open source is in a position to influence patent reform and help the small businesses that drive our economy. Shouldn’t we consider taking a look at the candidates from this perspective? I thought allowing people to share their opinion on who they see as the best “open source candidate” would be a good way to start a larger discussion.

    Assoli, the Italian Association for Free Software, earlier asked Italian Parliament candidates to engage themselves to promote the use of free software, maybe similar initiatives in the future will cover also provincial elections.

    Technorati Tags: Italian elections, open source government, Agrigento, EugeniodOrsi, Assoli, WilliamHurley

     

    • Giovanni Spoto 2:14 am on June 15, 2008 Permalink

      This information is misleadingly and is not true because the Arnone’s plan includes a part of open source philosophy, too! You can find the complete plan at the link http://www.peppearnone.net/ultime/programma.html
      A part of the plan:
      “sposeremo la filosofia alla base dell’open source, favorendo la partecipazione attiva di volontari allo sviluppo di quei processi necessari affinché il ‘sistema provincia’ assicuri delle risposte pronte”.

      Best Regards,
      Giovanni Spoto

    • Roberto Galoppini 9:18 am on June 15, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Giovanni,

      I didn’t know that also Peppe Arnone is in favor of open source, thank you to point it out. Let’s have a look at the two different approaches now.

      Eugenio D’Orsi’s press release reports:

      Perché lo slancio nell’adozione e lo sviluppo di soluzioni non diventi una semplice dichiarazione di intenti, magari prendendo la forma di una delibera di giunta a cui non seguano azioni concrete, è mia intenzione attivare un dialogo consultivo con le realtà associative e imprenditoriali sul territorio, e grazie al loro contributo definire un piano di azione efficace, che consenta alla pubblica amministrazione di efficientare il processo di acquisizione e utilizzo di soluzioni aperte,permettendo al tempo stesso alle imprese di contribuire positivamente a questa azione.

      According to that Eugenio D’Orsi wants to open up the dialog with associations and companies, in order to collaboratively define a plan to efficientize the IT procurement process. The role of IT firms seems central in his vision.

      Peppe Arnone instead is willing to bring in the equations volunteers to help the province to promptly answer citizens’ needs.

      Open source for public administrations is about foster open source ecosystems or is about involving volunteers?

      Let’s see what is going to happen after the elections..

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:57 pm on June 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    OpenOffice.org: OpenOffice.org gets its Extensions, just like Firefox! 

    The OpenOffice.org Italian Association announced that more than 100 Extensions nowadays are available for download.

    Everyone now can go and choose from a variety of different extensions, adjusting OpenOffice.org to her needs.

    Sun Presenter Console, just to name one of the very last ones available for OOo 3.0 beta, provides you with the ability to see the upcoming slide, the slide notes, and a presentation timer whereas the audience see only the current slide.

    Paolo Mantovani – PLIO’s founding member and known OpenOffice.org developer – developed BasicAddonBuilder, an OpenOffice.org extension that allows you to export a StarBasic library in the OpenOffice.org Extension format,
    ready for deployment. BasicAddonBuilder does not require special skills or a deep knowledge of extensions specifications.
    A wizard-style dialog will guide you through the process, allowing you to define in a graphical way all menu and toolbars that will be added to the OpenOffice.org user interface in order to launch macros from your StarBasic library.

    Paolo talking about his extension said:

    OpenOffice.org’s extensions are a great selling point, since they allow developers to create new functionalities and customizations, a very important characteristic in typical enterprise environments.

    Technorati Tags: PLIO, OpenOffice.org, openoffice, PaoloMantovani, openoffice extensions, firefox extensions, BasicAddonBuilder

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:14 am on June 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government: Ideas for ForumPA 2009 

    Leo Sorge, editor-in-chief of some important italian IT magazines, after my open source round-table at ForumPA contacted me for an interview for 01net magazine, and I took the chance to talk about what is missing here.

    PotentialOpen Source: our potential? by Kimberlee della Luce

    As a matter of fact the Italian IT market is highly fragmented, just like by other European countries the vast majority of IT firms are small, or very small. As results from a survey recently conducted by the Observatory of the European SMEs the dimension of a company is a critical success factor:

    Overall, the larger the enterprise, the more likely it is to have turnover from exports: almost hree in ten – 28% – of LSEs, but only 7% among micro-enterprises reported exports.

    Barriers to innovation are always the same:

    EU SMEs regard four factors as constituting equally important barriers to innovation: problems in access to finance, scarcity of skilled labour, a lack of market demand and expensive human resources. The larger an enterprise, the more likely it is to report problems in finding the necessary human resources, and the less likely it is to report difficulties in getting he financial resources that are necessary for innovative activity.

    Mind the Bridge and similar initiatives can help Italian startups to get VCs’ attention, people like Fabrizio Capobianco are the living proof that there is a way to get funded by North-American investors. ForumPA can definitely take advantage of his experience to help other Italians to follow his path.

    Competence networks, incubators and technology valleys are very important to deliver innovation and to access the required information to conduct business, as results from another survey of the Observatory:

    The following barriers to networking, specific to smaller high-tech firms, can be identified: (i) Often there is a lack of a ‘co-ordinator’, which might be an agency or a larger leading firm. (ii) Small firms, in contrast to large ones, have a short-term perspective and expect quick and concrete results. But research networking is comparably time-intensive and results are not immediately visible. To reduce efforts co-operation is kept simple and built with only very few partners. (iii) It is difficult to find a balance between the privacy of information and the necessary knowledge sharing.

    Roberto Di Cosmo in Paris is leading an entrepreneurial hub bringing together local SMEs and local public administrations. I believe that his experience could be of great help to foster communities of interests to develop products and solutions for the Italian public administration market.

    Last but not least I think that Italy should learn from others’ experiences, listening to ‘veterans’ like Petri Räsänen to understand possibilities and challenges using open source to help regional growth.

    Gianni, we got start to work on it as soon as possible. Right?

    Technorati Tags: PetriRäsänen, FabrizioCapobianco, RobertoDiCosmo, competence center, open source hub, public administration, observatory of european smes, forumpa, mind the bridge

     

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