Open source is one facet of a larger revolution in commercial and social life which can all be traced back to the inherently open nature of the Internet. At this year's EuroOSCON, we're taking OSCON's winning formula of practical sessions from innovators, and applying it beyond pure source code.

EuroOSCON is where business people, coders, decision makers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, artists, and policy makers using, creating, and managing free (libre) and open projects gather to learn about best practices, strategic issues, and coming changes. The 2006 O'Reilly European Open Source Convention takes place in Brussels, Belgium on 18-21 September.

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/48/sessions.html

The F/OSS training needs analysis questionnarie is now online, to evaluate the training needs in Free/Open Source Software to guide the development of the F/OSS curriculum within the TOSSAD project. Led by 4th workpackage partners, the questionnaire incorporates individual, organizational and task oriented aspects.

The questionnaire refers mainly to job and task analysis. Job analysis is a process of gathering, reporting, evaluating work-related information and task analysis is a method of determining the knowledge, skills, tools and requirements needed to perform a job. To this end, the objective of the  questionnaire is to gather information about the scope, responsibilities and tasks related to the F/OSS.

We kindly ask you to fill in the questionnarie and help us derive the analysis.

5th issue of the newsletter is published. Download and see what tOSSad partners are doing, here

As you know, tOSSad 2006 will be held in Como, Italy on June 10, 2006. The programme will be announced shortly, here and attendees are kindly requested to fill in this form in order to attend tOSSad workshop. See you there soon!

The first international workshop of FLOSSWorld with participation from all consortium partners (17 in all) will be held in Brussels, with additional participants from their countries, and most likely, observers from the organisations listed as having provided letters of support to the FLOSSWorld project. Registered FLOSSWorld Observers will also participate, and a limited number of places may be available to the general public. For this workshop participation from EU governments, universities, business associations and the European Commission have been be solicited.

Workshop participants will be experts representing the interests of the open source community, government, businesses, researchers and higher education institutes, as appropriate for the workshop questions. Some participants will take a more active role as specific questions are addressed, but in principle all the three research tracks below will be treated in each single workshop.

More information can be found on FlossWorld website .

After one year of tOSSad presence, 4th issue of the newsletter is published. Among the news are progress in workpackages, new deliverables and guidelines to be downloaded immediately. Download and see what tOSSad partners are doing, here

The study introduces general properties of OSS and highlights their advantages and disadvantages from a user's and developer's pint of view. By means of a survey performed by the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, the study contains the analysis of the distribution and adoption of OSS in a large organisation. Relevant commercial and free software products are compared for important application areas. Furthermore a methodological procedure for the calculation of profitability when adopting OSS is presented. The study offers a valuable support for decision makers and users who want to profit from the potentials of OSS.

You can download your copy (in German only) from here (PDF).

Under the FlossWorld project (flossworld.org) Internet Society - Bulgaria is organizing a workshop on "Free and Open Source Software in South-Eastern Europe".

The workshop will be held on 24th and 25th of March, 2006 in Sofia, Bulgaria. The main goal of the workshop will be to identify regional specifics in FLOSS, addressing the FlossWorld tracks (Human capacity building, Software development, e-Government policy) and create a basis for further collaboration with the community.

The SEE countries which will be represented during the workshop are Bulgaria, Croatia, Turkey and Macedonia. The topics to discuss will be: the FLOSS community, the business, e-government,skills development and education with FLOSS. Görkem Çetin (TUBITAK – UEKAE)and Bulent Ozel (Bilgi University) from tOSSad will be giving a presentations about F/OSS presence in Turkey. You can find more information from the web site of the workshop and check the agenda on http://www.foss.bg/conf.

We believe that this organization will be a driving initiative between tOSSad and FLOSSWorld and lead to future communications and collaborations among other parties related to F/OSS.

We will have a tOSSad presentation at 'FOSS Days 2006' event in Istanbul. The tOSSad session is programmed as the first keynote session. Each Workpackage representative will briefly mention objectives,  tasks: fulfilled and to be done.

The details of the tOSSad session are the following:

Date: February 24, Friday
Duration: 10:10-11:00

Speakers:

10:10-10:20 Introduction (Kaan Erkan)

10:20-10:25 WP1 (Julia Velkova)

10:25-10:30 WP2 (Bülent Özel)

10:30-10:35 WP3 (Sandra Frings)

10:30-10:40 WP4 (Al Harris)

10:40-10:45 WP5 (Görkem Çetin)

10:45-11:00 Q & A

We look forward to see you in the event.

' F/OSS days' is one of the largest F/OSS event in Turkey. It is organized by Istanbul Bilgi University.  Some of the tOSSad partners will participate the event and collabarate with local organizers towards F/OSS adoption disseminations. An excerpt from organization web site is here:

"Free Software; a movement started in 1980´s is showing its effects on the whole software market. Companies -from the biggest to the smallest- are taking their parts, some adapting to this new practice, some fighting agaist it, but it sure has its effects as freedom takes its toll.

Peru, Israel, Spain and Germany are just few of the countries which have decided that closed source, proprietary softwares, are neither affordable, nor reliable -especially concerning security. Thus they have taken giant steps to make the transition to Open Source systems.

In such a world, there are lots of opportunities for Turkey, such as to become a software developer and implementor country rather than a software importer. Or to raise the amount of computer literate people by setting up thousands of public computer labs using free softwares such as GNU/Linux OS on low-cost legacy computers.

Now all we need is to have people, especially young people using, developing and deploying Free/Open Source Softwares on free operating systems, with no licence fees, no cumbersome copyright restrictions or slavery enduser agreements.

In order to accomplish this goal, Bilgi University is hosting the Free Software and Open Source Days. For two days time, we´ll be having tutorial sessions, lectures, discussions and chats about Free Software, Open Source with Ian Murdock, Branden Robinson and various free software pioneers from Europe."