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Limited access to OSOR during migration to Joinup next week — published on Nov 30, 2011

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Registered users of the OSOR will have limited access to the site between this Friday, 2 December at 14:00 and next week Friday, 9 December, 14:00. Between those dates the OSOR web site will be migrated to its new location at Joinup. To ensure data integrity, login will be disabled to avoid modification of data during the migration.

IT: Sicily to consider law promoting the use of open source — published on Nov 29, 2011

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The regional administration of the Italian island of Sicily is to consider a law nudging public administrations to use of free and open source software. The proposal, by Massimo Ferrara, a member of the Democratic Party, might also help prevent the break-up of a school on the island, the Instituto Majorana, involved in producing instruction videos on this type of software.

IT: Communication vital for move to open source — published on Nov 29, 2011

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Public administrations that want to move to vendor independent open source applications need to put a lot of effort in communication, recommends Massimo Carnevali, until recently the IT manager of the municipality of Bologna in Italy. "Communicate to everybody, from users to management. Explaining where users can find help could be more important than actually providing it."

EU: 'A standard is open when implemented in open source' — published on Nov 29, 2011

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A public sector organisation should only refer to a software or file format standard if the standard has been implemented in a sustainable open source software implementation. Without such implementation there is significant risk for the organisation, recommends Björn Lundell after a review of public administration's policies. Lundell is a researcher at the University of Skövde in Sweden.

LV: Valmiera city council 'saving energy and costs with open source' — published on Nov 23, 2011

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The city council of Valmiera in Latvia is saving both energy and money by migrating its physical servers to virtual servers using open source virtualisation tools, says Kaspars Urbāns, head of the city's IT department. "You will be pleasantly surprised by the electricity bill. With the amount Valmiera saves this way, it could buy a new server for the cluster every six months."

More open source software at European Space Agency — published on Nov 21, 2011

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The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to publish more of its software using open source licences. It is considering to use a source code tracking system to help untangle code that can be made available as open source and programs that, for whatever reason, can not.

EU CV tool increasingly used by universities and employment agencies — published on Nov 18, 2011

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European universities and employment agencies are increasingly making use of a Europass Curriculum Vitae, an open standard for creating and managing résumés (CVs). Also increasingly popular is the European Union's web service to create such CVs: this year the service is used more than a hundred thousand times, according to the European Centre for Vocational Training (Cedefop) based in Thessaloniki, Greece.

FR: Government procuring two million euro worth of open source support — published on Nov 17, 2011

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The French government just published a request for ICT service providers to offer support including Debian and Centos based Linux systems, Le Monde Informatique reports. The three-year contract is worth two million euro and involves 16 of the country's 22 ministries and the Court of Audit.

NL: System to display zoning permits online available as open source — published on Nov 10, 2011

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Software that combines geographic information systems (GIS) with zoning regulations and other country wide sources of information on land use, and offered online as an interactive map, was made available as open source software by the Dutch ministry of the Interior last week. The tool, titled Geozet, is hosted on the OSOR Forge since 1 November.

UK government open source procurement toolkit — published on Nov 03, 2011

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Tools to help public administrations procure open source were published by the UK government yesterday. The toolkit is part of the cabinet's ICT strategy to "create a level playing field for the use of innovative ICT solutions".