Posts in Democracy Code - The Open Source and Technology Exchange

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <email obscured>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:25:29 +0100 (CET)
Subject: [OSOR-news] OSOR Monthly Open Source News Service - October 2008
To: <email obscured>

Open Source Observatory and Repository for European public administrations
Monthly Open Source News Service — 31 October 2008
Welcome to the Monthly Open Source News Service of the OSOR project!

This monthly alert keeps you updated with news related to the use of
Free/Libre/Open Source software (FLOSS) in the public sector in
Europe. It includes the latest FLOSS software-related news,
activities, initiatives and insights from across Europe and beyond.

Since June 2008, the OSOR project has its own dedicated new generation
portal with a broader scope and enhanced features. Please visit at the
new address: http://osor.eu.

Launch of Osor.eu at the Open Source World Conference

The Open Source Observatory and Repository for European public
administrations (OSOR) – the site devoted to the re-using, sharing and
collaborative development of E-Government applications for European
public administrations – was officially launched at the Open Source
World Conference in Malaga on October 20th 2008. As Mr. Francesco
García Morán – the Director General for Informatics of the European
Commission – highlighted in his keynote presentation, the Osor.eu
platform is one of the results of a long process led by the IDABC
programme in the Commission. Through various programs and projects,
the European Commission provides the basic foundations and structure
of an open source ecosystem to support public administrations.

20 October 2008 | Malaga, Spain

Draft Guidelines on Procurement and Open Source Software Study
presented at the OSOR launch event

One important function of OSOR is to provide a space for publishing
and sharing ideas and experience related to using open source in the
public sector. Many public administrations, however, feel uncertain
about where and how to start implementing open source solutions and
are looking for advice and guidance. Therefore, the European
Commission's IDABC project presented the first version of its set of
guidelines at the OSOR launch event in Malaga, Spain on 20th October
2008. This study aims to provide practical help to policy makers, IT
managers and procurement officials in their procurement processes.
Since this is still a draft version, OSOR will welcome your comments
through the forum linked to the study. Comments and suggestions will
be used in preparing the final version of the guidelines.

20 October 2008 | Malaga, Spain

Case Study

| View all cases

Rock solid: School servers in Powys county, Wales, UK

To provide its pupils with Internet and email access, Powys county
council in 1999 implemented an open source-based server solution in
schools. Council staff were already familiar with free software, since
the council had used LAMP web servers since 1997. The solution was
upgraded for greater capabilities in 2004/05.

27 October 2008 | United Kingdom

Latest News

| View all News

EU: Hidden cost of proprietary standards may lead to illegal tenders

| 27 October 2008 | European Union

RU: Open Source installed in more than a thousands schools

| 27 October 2008 | Russia

DE: Foreign ministry: 'Cost of Open Source desktop maintenance is by
far the lowest'

| 27 October 2008 | Germany

EU: Updated guide on Open Source for SMEs

| 27 October 2008 | EU

EU: Commission tailors GNU/Linux server specialised in blogs

| 24 October 2008 | European Union

FI: City of Oulu: "Open Source offers very competitive alternative"

| 24 October 2008 | Finland

ES: Government publishes Open Source mobile phone text reader

| 22 October 2008 | Spain

EU: Many software tenders in EU maybe 'illegal'

| 21 October 2008 | European Union

FR: April decries lack of Open Source in government multimedia plan

| 19 October 2008 | France

LV: Finance ministry cautions considering Open Source

| 19 October 2008 | Latvia

NL: Amsterdam approves Open Source desktop

| 19 October 2008 | The Netherlands

EU: 'European Public licence preferable to GPLv3'

| 17 October 2008 | European Union

IT: Sardinia to reduce spending by switching to Open Source

| 17 October 2008 | Italy

ES: Cenatic: 'Training critical to government uptake of Open Source'

| 16 October 2008 | Spain

IT: University starts Open Source master course

| 15 October 2008 | Italy

CZ: Administrations keen to use Open Source document management system

| 14 October 2008 | Czech Republic

FR: 'Changes to GPL beneficial for government's use of Open Source'

| 03 October 2008 | France

ES: Extremadura's Open Source system offers first web services

| 30 September 2008 | Spain

EU: GNU celebrates 25th birthday

| 30 September 2008 | European Union

LT: Education Ministry supports schools using GNU/Linux

| 30 September 2008 | Lithuania

NL: Patent Office begins migration to Open Source

| 29 September 2008 | The Netherlands

EU: FSFE to release copyright assignment tool in ten languages

| 29 September 2008 | European Union

ES: Catalonia presented plans to increase its Open Source use

| 29 September 2008 | Spain

SE: ODF made national standard in Sweden

| 25 september 2008 | Sweden

UK: Open Source company in list of schools software suppliers

| 25 september 2008 | United Kingdom

Upcoming Events

| View all events

3rd Free Software Congress. Region of Valencia

| 05 - 07 November 2008 | Alicante, Spain

NL: Embedded and mobile use of GNU/Linux

| 06 - 07 November 2008 | Ede, The Netherlands

GNU/Linux is increasingly being used in mobile equipment. On Thursday
November 6 and 7 two conferences are jointly taking place on this
topic in the city of Ede, the Netherlands.

Linux 2008 - Conference and Tutorials

| 07 - 09 November 2008 | Manchester, United Kingdom

Linux 2008 will take place at the Manchester Conference Centre, part
of the University of Manchester, from Friday 7 to Sunday 9 November.
The organisers expect the talks and discussions to cover a variety of
subjects, including kernel and desktop development, tools,
applications, networking and security.

NL: Procuring Open Source Software

| 13 November 2008 | Utrecht, The Netherlands

A workshop by experts in the field of procurement and Open Source
applications is organised in the city of Utrecht, The Netherlands. The
expert will share their experiences and give advice on the
possibilities offered by this kind of software.

BE: Open Source ERP solutions

| 18 November 2008 | Belgium

A conference on Open Source ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) will
take place in Brussels on 18 November and 2 December.

BE: Workshop on intellectual property rights and ICT standards

| 19 November 2008 | Brussels, Belgium

The European Commission is organising a one-day workshop on
intellectual property rights and ICT standards on 19 November 2008 in
Brussels. The conference is meant to address the issue of patented
technologies included in IT standards and specifications.

IT: Open Source conference on Geographic Information Systems

| 28 November 2008 | Pontedera, Italy

Gfoss.it, a conference on Open Source Geographic Information Systems,
is taking place in the city of Pontedera, Italy on November 28.

FR: Forum Mondial du Libre

| 01 - 02 December 2008 | Paris, France

At the hub of the FLOSS movement, the Open World Forum provides an
international venue where FLOSS community members, politicians, IT
decision makers, software project managers and leading-edge
researchers and academics can meet.

ES: 4th International Conference on Geographic Information Systems

| 03 - 05 December 2008 | Valencia, Spain

The 4th International Conference on Geographic Information Systems
(GIS) will be organised by the Government of Valencia on 3-5 December
2008. The conference aims to demonstrate that the integration of Open
Source technologies could offer professional solutions in the fields
of GIS and Spatial Data Infrastructure.

PT: Open Source Software Workshop OSEHC 2009

| 16 - 17 January 2009 | Porto, Portugal

A workshop "Open Source in European Health Care" aims to demonstrate
the potential of Open Source in health care.

BE: FOSDEM 2009

| 21 - 22 February 2009 | Brussels, Belgium

The ninth edition of the Free and Open Source Software Developers'
European Meeting (Fosdem) will take place in February 2009.

NL: Netherlands Open in Connection Congress

| 05 March 2009 | The Netherlands

The First Netherlands Open in Connection (NOIV) Congress will take
place on 5 March 2009. The conference aims to inform and advise the
Dutch public sector about the possibilities of Open Source software.
The location of the conference has not yet been decided.

The OSOR.EU project is a pan-European information platform on
Free/Libre/Open Source software in the public sector, and is intended
to promote and spread the use of best practices in Europe. It aims to
provide a comprehensive overview of Free/Libre/Open Source Software
policies and activities in the public sector, especially in current
and future EU Member States.

You can click here to unsubscribe or to modify your subscription.

Please feel free to forward this alert to any other interested
persons, and to send us your comments and suggestions. We also welcome
your contributions and we invite you to send in news items,
announcements for events and other stories related to FLOSS and of
interest to public administrations to the email address mentioned
below. Moreover, if you belong to a public authority or a public
sector organisation and would be interested in being the subject of a
case study for best practices regarding open source software, please
contact us. All emails should be sent to info[at]osor.eu.

(c) European Communities 2008.
Reproduction is authorised provided the source is acknowledged.
The views expressed are not an official position of the European Commission.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Richard Waid <<email obscured>>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:32:56 +1200
Subject: [GroupServer Announcements] GroupServer 1.0 Alpha
To: <email obscured>

Well. Finally we're announcing the GroupServer 1.0 alpha release: Cream
Freeze at the Beach. If it seems like it's been a long time since the
last release... it has. The previous release was April 10th 2006.

To try it out right away, you can find the buildout here:

   http://www.groupserver.org/downloads/

I'll give a rundown on what's changed, but first I think a bit of
background on why the release has taken us so long is in order.

The previous release was pretty good, but it was quite difficult to
test, and had dependencies on a lot of 'through-the-web' code and
templates (code stored in an object database, for those not familiar
with Zope). This made it tricky to provide an upgrade path, and
customisation for our different clients wasn't the easiest thing either.

So we held back the release till we could get to the stage where
upgrading was possible (because it's in our best interest for people to
be able to upgrade to the latest version as easily as possible), and the
code base allowed us to easily integrate changes from contributors.

Obviously in all this time we've made other changes to the system. The
one word summary of what has changed could be "Everything". Here is a
longer version, in no particular order:

- Much of the system data (but not yet all) is now stored in a
relational database.

- Still using Zope 2, but with extensive work undertaken to shift
towards Zope 3 using the Five bridge.

- The XML/XSLT processing framework has been all but completely removed
from GroupServer. This was an interesting idea that was, for the most
part, somewhat premature.

- Performance has improved at least an order of magnitude in every area,
and in some cases several orders of magnitude.

- Many, many bugfixes and refactorings have occurred -- over 2900
revisions since the last release, including crushing some particularly
annoying unicode bugs.

- Chat feature -- a simple, AJAX based web chat client.

- Skinnable using Zope 3 style skins

- Complete rebuild of the message rendering interface, using search,
AJAX for progressive rendering.

- A huge number of other interface refinements, and many more management
screens

- Replaced the underlying javascript library. Twice. (now using jQuery:
http://www.jquery.com)

- Site and user-configurable timezones with support for Daylight Saving
Time

- Total rewrite of the registration, email verification and user
profiles

- The beginnings of a content management framework -- more of this will
land before the beta release (based on WYMEditor:
http://www.wymeditor.org -- an awesome editor)

- Refined bounce handler

- More extensive logging of user actions

- Group participation statistics

- Rewritten file library, now using search and fully integrating files
with messages

- Completely new search framework

- Keywording of emails to produce automatic email summaries

- More atom feeds

- New redirection framework to allow shorter links to several types of
content

- Buildout based environment, making it easier to get a consistent
development (and production) environment

You can find more information about the direction of GroupServer here:

   http://www.groupserver.org/groupserver/roadmap/

As always, we are open to bribery when it comes to our roadmap -- Beer,
Vodka and Money all work particularly well.

At this stage we want feedback, bugfixes, feedback, documentation and
feedback. Feedback would also be good.

If you'd like to participate in the development process (encouraged!)
we have two groups:

GroupServer Development (discussion about new features, improvements to
existing features, general ideas):

   http://www.groupserver.org/groups/development

GroupServer Team (invitation or by request only, for those with commit
access):

   http://www.groupserver.org/groups/groupserver_team

This release has primarily been supported by:

   Advanced Business Education Limited
   http://www.abel.ac.nz/about/abel

   E-Democracy.org Forums
   http://forums.e-democracy.org/

   Onlinegroups.net
   http://www.onlinegroups.net

An extra special plug for OnlineGroups.net, without whom releasing
GroupServer would not be possible -- Start your free hosted GroupServer
public site today at http://onlinegroups.net/sites/start_a_site/


--
Richard Waid
Technical Lead
Onlinegroups.net


-----------------------------------------
Full text of this topic in GroupServer Announcements:
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