F/OSS faces more barriers in some regions of Europe that include mostly ACC and NMS because of various social, political, economical, and technical factors. On the other hand, F/OSS appears to be a big opportunity for such countries, by enabling rapid and affordable deployment of information technology, skills development, cheaper solutions for education and public administrations, thus impacts the development of national and regional economies.

The tOSSad project aims to improve the outcomes of the F/OSS communities throughout Europe by supporting the coordination and networking of these communities by means of state-of-the-art studies, national program initiations, usability cases, curriculum development and the development of collaborative information portals and web-based groupware. By conducting these actions on an international European level, with inclusion of the ACC and NMS countries, the tOSSad project will create sufficient momentum for a general acceptance and coordinated boost of F/OSS development. tOSSad is an FP6 project funded under IST-3.