Publications

This report examines the major benefits of the F/OSS adoption within Public Administrations. It highlights the economic basis for such government decisions and whether F/OSS provides cost effective solutions to Public Administration's current reliance on proprietary software (PS). The report argues that F/OSS offers benefits beyond economic interests towards an open society reducing as well the digital divide.

This workshop report discusses status, requirements and  obstacles of FOSS adoption for national programs around Europe. The workshop was held in Merida,  on October 26, 2005,  within Open Source World Conference, in Extremadura, Spain.

It highlights the fact that there exists a will in the Public Administrations to use F/OSS, but it is mainly limited to regional and local administrations. It points unclear position of the central government administrations on the usage of F/OSS. Although high level government representatives often support F/OSS, there are almost no examples of legislative papers, or strategies, or any documents issued by central Governments that stimulate and encourage the usage of F/OSS.

Along with workshop presentatation slides, you can also find briefs on status of F/OSS adoption in some European caountries, such as, Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Malta, Slovenia, Sweden, Turkey, and Ukraine. 

This report discusses the methodology for building a F/OSS laboratory for different kinds of F/OSS curriculum and gives a step-by-step tutorial for the implementation of the proposed approaches.

This document reports on the tOSSad project's efforts towards the development of F/OSS Curricula suitable for delivery in a range of educational settings. The need for F/OSS curricula arise for two principal reasons: (1) shortage of workforce skilled in F/OSS, (2) lack of components for basic knowledge on F/OSS in current curricula.

This document describes the First Workshop on F/OSS Curriculum Development and is the 1st deliverable of work package 4 of tOSSad project. This document has been compiled by WP4 members.

The Second Workshop of tOSSad WP4 on F/OSS Curriculum Development was held on 10 June 2006 in Como, Italy, in the context of the 2nd International Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS2006.

This document describes the Second Workshop on F/OSS Curriculum Development and is a deliverable of work package 4 (WP4) of tOSSad (towards Open Source Software adoption and dissemination) project. This document has been compiled by WP4 members.

The main objective of the tOSSad WP4 workshop at the OSS 2006 meeting was to revise, to integrate, and to plan further development of a vendor neutral F/OSS curriculum, designed to fit the needs of educational institutes and of firms using F/OSS at various levels.

In this report, tOSSad partners try to answer the question “How can we achieve more usability within geographically distributed projects?”. We'll first define the basic characteristics of a F/OSS project and investigate the problems encountered that slow down the usability process and F/OSS development. In the following chapter, we analyse the F/OSS developers, i.e. why their interest in usability is not inline with their interest in feature adding for a software project. Then, we give advice and recommendations on how to attract and convince usability experts to participate in  F/OSS projects.

tOSSad Workshop on Governmental, Educational, Usability, and Legal Issues towards Open Source Software Adoption in an enlarged Europe

Hosted by  The Second International Conference on Open Source Systems  June 10th 2006, Grand Hotel, Como, Italy

In this report, tOSSad workpackage 3 (F/OSS usability study), partners have tested 28 subjects (the focus group) in order to analyse the usability issues of the open source office suite, OpenOffice.org 2.0. Our work has focused on interviewing and timing the test subjects as they complete a predefined given test schema. Analysis of the data has allowed a more complete picture of user interactions with the OpenOffice.org software suite to be presented.