Booklet on Asian FLOSS/CSO projects
Last January-February I attended the Asia Source event near Bangalore, India. Asia Source was a wonderful meeting of FLOSS and civil society organisation people mostly from around Asia. I got to meet nice people and hear about interesting projects utilizing free software and related technologies (wiki, blogs etc.)
Frederick Noronha has now written a booklet with short articles and interviews covering many of the people and projects present at Asia Source. It is a useful resource for those interested in real-life projects utilising FLOSS in those areas.
Introduction to FOSS in development
An introductory article “Free and Open Source Software Strategies for Sustainable Information Society”, written by me and Tere, is available as a part of a new book University Partnership for International Development. Finnish Development Knowledge for the interested.
P.S. Just noticed that the ITU Strategy and Policy Unit has a
blog covering many interesting topics, including open source.
African FOSS policies
bridges.org has published a very useful and interesting report on FOSS policies in African countries.
The report
is targeted at governments that are investigating whether and how they can integrate FOSS into their strategies for social and economic development. It provides a broad overview of how FOSS fits into national ICT policy-making, outlines the areas where governments can take policy decision related to FOSS as well as some of the possible approaches, and lists activities related to FOSS policy from across Africa. It recommends an approach to FOSS policy-making linked to national development goals and discusses some example development goals and how FOSS policies could address them.
The report has an overview of country policies and a good overview of effects of FOSS on development.
WIPO discussion on IP
WIPO has opened a forum for discussion on IP:
The WIPO Online Forum is designed to enable and encourage an open debate on issues related to intellectual property in the information society, and in light of the goals of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
I hope the input will be taken into account. Next part of the WSIS process will take place in
Tunis, from 16 to 18 November 2005.
Digital divide conference papers available
Recently we had a conference dealing with several digital divide related topics: citizen participation, free software, biopatents, copyright, and sustainable information society. Some papers are available. Keynotes by Colin Lankshear and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh may be of interest to FLOSS researchers, as well as the papers in the “Open and Collaborative models” session and Tere Vadén’s paper from the IP session. My presentation is missing from the conference site; you can read the slides while I’m finishing my paper. I think the conference was succesful. I met some good people to work with in the future.
Also, hello to people reading Planet FLOSS Research.
