Re: COSPA

[Paul Cooper <pgc openadvantage org>]

On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 19:42 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> "The Consortium (for Open Source in Public Administration) aims at analysing
> the effects of the introduction of Open Data Standards (ODS) and Open Source
> (OS) software for personal productivity and document management in European
> PAs."
> 
>   http://www.cospa-project.org/
> 
> Pretty OpenOffice.org focused at the moment, but definitely something to
> keep our collective eyes on. Anyone have further insight?

I'm an 'observer' of the project (which AFAICT means I'm on their
internal mailing list). As the paragraph above says they are mainly
interesting in measuring the effects of ODS and OSS use in public
administration. Is it possible, are there problems, how much does it
cost, what about data migration, which tools are good, which are not.
These are the types of questions they are interested in. Of course along
with that is a certain amount of advocacy. They are also organising a
conference,

http://oss2005.case.unibz.it/

Another project is OSOSS http://www.ososs.nl/index.jsp?alias=english
which is a unit in the Dutch government to encourage departments / civil
service to use open standards and open source.

These two are pretty public sector focused. In addition there is
http://www.coss.fi/ which is about assisting SME (small to medium
enterprises - in EU terms a business with less than 250 employees and
less than 40m euro) in the adoption of open source. They do that mostly
through advice and resources such as their bluebook of OSS solutions
companies. Juha K Siltala gave a talk about the intersection of Freedom
and Profit in Gnome and OOo communities at their recent conference
http://www.coss.fi/openmind/seminarprogram.htm

Then finally there is us http://www.openadvantage.org/ we provide advice
and resources for anyone in the West Midlands interested in open source
in any way - use, develop, commercialise. We are pretty focused on IT
companies at the moment although we have a lot of interest from
voluntary and charity groups and just recently local government. Most of
the interest is on server side technology however there has been an
increasing amount for desktop technologies.

There are of course other projects around europe, including the new
accession states, but these are the ones I know of from meeting people o
being involved. 

Regards,

Paul



> - Jeff
> 
> -- 
> Ubuntu in Mataró, Spain: December 5th-18th      http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
>  
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-- 
Paul Cooper                    |  Tel: 0121 634 1620
Assistant Director             |  Fax: 0121 634 1630
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