UNESCO activities in the field of Free Open Source Software (FOSS)

Transcription

UNESCO-UNDP consultation meeting
UNESCO HQ, 24, 25 November 2003
UNESCO activities in the field of Free Open
Source Software (FOSS)
Information Society Division
UNESCO
Jean-Claude Dauphin ([email protected])
UNESCO, United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization
In October 2003 with the return of the United States to
UNESCO, the organization is now comprise of 190
Member States and six Associate Members.
In 2003, the Secretariat employs around 2000 civil
servants, two-thirds of it work at Headquarters.
Field Offices and Institutes -- Decentralization, mainly
through field offices. UNESCO's Field network consists of
Cluster Offices, National Offices, Regional Bureaux and
Liaison Offices in Africa, Arab States, Asia and the Pacific,
Latin America and Europe. Their role is to co-ordinate the
work of the Organization at regional level.
Regular Budget 2004 2005: 610 Million Dollars
Extra- budgetary resources: 400 Million dollars
UNESCO's mission
Standard-setting action : the preparation and
adoption of international instruments and statutory
recommendations.
Expertise:
Expertise provided to Member States for their
development policies and projects in the form of
"technical co-operation".
Prospective Studies:
Studies what forms of education,
science, culture and communication for tomorrow's
world?
The advancement, transfer and sharing of
knowledge:
knowledge relying primarily on research, training
and teaching activities.
How FOSS fits into UNESCO's mission
and objectives.
The Medium-Term Strategy for 2002-2007 has
formulated two crosscutting themes:
the eradication of poverty, especially extreme
poverty;
contribution of information and communication
technologies (ICTs) to education, science,
culture and information and the building of
knowledge.
and objectives.
What
Information
and
communications
technologies (ICTs) have to offer is an orders of
magnitude increase in the multiplier effect for the
creation of knowledge and its dissemination.
Software is extremely important to the new
information society we are entering. It is the cyber
nerve system of the new information and
communication technologies (ICTs), and has a
disproportionate economic impact on this new
world. The use of Free Open Source Software can
make a real difference.
and objectives.
Every computer needs an operating system, and
software are needed everywhere, they are the glue
which make any piece of hardware to work and
communicate.
Software
has
been
powering
both
the
telecommunications network and the Internet for
many years now.
Software will continue to power the network in the
future too, while networks and services become
more complex and sophisticated.
and objectives.
UNESCO is a UN specialized agency for the
promotion of international co-operation and
dissemination of knowledge.
The software development models used by the
Free and Open Source Software movements are
also good examples of the power of sharing
knowledge. These models encourage international
solidarity, collaboration and voluntary community
work amongst institutions, programmers and
computer users.
UNESCO Free Software Portal
In 2001, UNESCO began to lend its support
to the Free Software/Open Source
Movements, and has recognized that in the
computer science field, these movements
play a key role to extend and disseminate
human knowledge.
The UNESCO Free Software Portal was
developed and published in November 2001. It
gives access to local and remote documents,
which are reference works for the Free and Open
Source Software movements, as well as to
websites which are hosting the most popular and
useful Open Source/Free software packages in
UNESCO fields of competence.
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/portal_freesoft
UNESCO has also established a special
agreement with the Free Software
Foundation (FSF) for mirroring on UNESCO
Free Software Portal and updating regularly
the Free Software Directory.
(http://fsd.unesco.org/directory/ ).
Free and Open Source Software - a
feasibility study -- Swedish Agency for
Public Management
A Swedish study has concluded that open
standards and formats, along with free and
open source software, are important factors
in arriving at increased competitiveness,
improved interoperability and reduced costs
for administration in the public sector.
Free Open Source Migration Guidelines
European Commission's Open Source
Migration Guidelines. The IDA Open Source
Migration Guidelines provide practical and detailed
recommendations on how to migrate to Open
Source Software (OSS)-based office applications,
calendaring, e-mail and other standard
applications.
German government publishes open source
guidelines. A guide to migrating the basic software
components on server and workstation computers.
Greenstone Digital Library
Software package
UNESCO has produced with the New
Zealand Digital Library Project (NZDL)
of the University of Waikato (New
Zealand) and the Human Info NGO
(Antwerp) a tri-lingual (English-FrenchSpanish) version of the Free Open
source Greenstone Digital Library
software suite.
Software package
Greenstone is distributed on CD-ROM and from
sourceforge website, it includes:
the installation, user and developer
documentation;
binary executable versions for Windows and
GNU/Linux with user-friendly installers and
model digital libraries;
as well as the whole source code of the
software including the third party components
also available under GPL licensing.
Software package
Greenstone has been developed with
UNICODE standard in mind and thus
supports the creation of digital libraries with
documents written in any language as well as
the localization of the software itself.
Software package
It is expected that the Greenstone software
package will enable educational, scientific
and cultural institutions worldwide to build
and share compatible digital libraries of open
access and public domain information.
http://www.greenstone.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/greenstone/
Virtual Laboratory Toolkit
In December 2002, the first edition of the
UNESCO "Virtual Laboratory Toolkit" has
been released on the World Wide Web and
within UNESCO's Public@ series of
representative "open access" CD-ROMs
that are giving access to information in the
public domain or to information provided on
a benevolent basis by rights holders.
The Toolkit provides an extensive set of
free (Free Open Source Software) tools for:
person-to-person (P2P) communication (audio
and video conference, scientific text chat,
whiteboard, collaborative authorship, portal and
mailing list management, etc.);
basic advice on person-to-equipment (P2E)
communication.
It was developed for UNESCO by a team of
specialists working with the Institute for
Informatics of the Technical University of Freiberg
, Germany (Technical Coordinator):
the COPINE Centre of the Obafemi Awolowo
University (Ile Ife, Nigeria)
and the Shanghai Research Centre for Applied
Physics (China)
The Toolkit is available for testing and
application by scientists and other
researchers, particularly in developing
countries, who are interested in creating
or participating in virtual laboratories.
http://virtuallab.tu-freiberg.de/
Consortium of FOSS Developers and Users
in Latin America and the Caribbean
In 2001, several international events to
support free software happened:
Latin-American Workshop for the Promotion of
Open Software in Education, Science, Culture and
Social Areas (Havana, Cuba, 25-27 June 2001).
Free Software International Forum (Porto Alegre,
Brazil, 29-31 May 2001)
Free Software Regional Meeting (Montevideo,
Uruguay, Meeting (Montevideo, Uruguay, 28-30
June 2001
LACFREE Software Libre Conference
11,12,13 August in Cusco, Peru
In the framework of the Free Software
Developers and Users Consortium,
initiated by UNESCO Montevideo and
Lima Offices, the Latin American and
Caribbean Conference on Free Software
Development and Usage (LACFREE) took
place Cuzco, Peru, from 11 to 13 August
2003.
LACFREE Software Libre Conference
11,12,13 August in Cusco, Peru
The conference was aimed at:
promoting knowledge on the usage of free
software,
exchanging
experiences
and
new
implementation practices,
as well as analyzing the impact that free
software has on the evolution of information
society within developing countries.
UNESCO's activities related to FOSS
to be implemented in 2004-2005
A project relating to cross-cutting theme:
The contribution of information and
communication technologies to education,
science, culture and information and the
building of knowledge.
"Promoting Free Software and building capacities
for the Free/Open Source development of UNESCO
Information processing and Education software
tools" has been proposed.
planned for 2004-2005
The idea is that UNESCO should be a
catalyser, coordinator and a repository for
producing and disseminating free-of-charge
selected UNESCO free open source
information processing and education tools
in UNESCO fields of competence,
competence which are
desperately needed in UNESCO Member
States (tools for information processing, data
mining, learning content management system,
courseware authoring tool, etc).
The whole development will be based on
the « FOSS development model « , thus
encouraging international solidarity,
collaboration and voluntary community work
amongst institutions, programmers and
computer users.
Another objective is to set up a UNESCO
software development web based
collaborative working environment,
environment
providing free hosting to the selected
software projects, facilities and a centralized
place for FOSS developers. The selected
projects will be hosted, coordinated and
maintained by UNESCO, thus achieving
sustainability.
Regular input about the requirements and
testing will be provided by UNESCO
sectors directly concerned by a project,
thus adding UNESCO value and UNESCO
Member States needs to the project.
Promotion of FOSS will focus on the further
development of UNESCO Free software portal
(FSP).
Extension of FSP to include documentation,
both printed and on-line,
line about the software
packages.
The documentation section will be extended with
more in depth documents. This will promote all
Free
Documentation
and
encourage
its
development.
Free Documentation is particularly useful because
it is frequently available in a wide range of
languages, and based on actual user experiences.
Promotion of FOSS will focus on the further
development of UNESCO Free software
portal (FSP).
Translation to make the UNESCO Free
Software Portal
multi-lingual (French,
Spanish, Portuguese first and then Chinese,
Russian & Hindi.
Migration of UNESCO Freeware
Information Processing Tools to the
Open Source Development model.
UNESCO has acquired long experience in
the development and dissemination of
UNESCO information processing and
management tools and systems.
CDS/ISIS and IDAMS are well-known
examples and are used world-wide. Much
expertise and knowledge are embedded in
these tools and all related documentation.
CDS/ISIS
The computerized Documentation System
CDS/ISIS is a tool developed and distributed by
UNESCO free of charge to libraries and information
centers worldwide for almost 20 years now. Around
18,000 registered users worldwide.
Some third party components have already been
developed using the Open Source model like the
Marc21Lite support module, developed in
cooperation with the Library of Congress.
IDAMS
IDAMS (Internationally Developed data Analysis
and Management Software), is a software
package for data mining, numerical information
processing and statistical analysis.
IDAMS has been distributed to more than 5600
users (individuals or institutions).
OpenIDAMS to be launched in 2004
FREEDUC 1.4
Live CD-ROM of Free Software for schools
developed by ofset
Ofset – Organization for Free Software in Education
and Teaching
Last version is 1.4. This version is very special
because it was realized with the help of UNESCO. It
comes with a set of documentation in English,
French and Spanish. This documentation can be
found at the root of the cd-rom in the doc folder
(PDF document) or directly when booting the cdrom (html form for on-line reading).
RINAF Low cost hardware and open
software Project
Framework for cooperation within UNESCO's
intergovernmental Information For All programme
(IFAP)
UNESCO Regional Information Society Network
for Africa (www.unesco.org/rinaf )
was initiated in 1992 to strengthen the capacity of
the public sector and the civil society in Africa to
exploit information and communication
technologies for development
RINAF Low cost hardware and open
software Project
RINAF started in 2001 four pilot projects with an
initial phase to develop project documents for
extrabudgetary funding (1) RINAF Virtual
Multimedia Academy, 2) RINAF Web site design
competition, 3) RINAF Distance Education Project,
and 4) RINAF low cost hardware and open
software project)
The aim of the low cost hardware and open
software project is to build up from a feasibility
study for an affordable African ICT tool
Economic evaluation of Free and
Open Source software (FOSS)
solutions for African education.
This activity is intended to provide a definitive
statement and guidelines on the relative
advantages and disadvantages of FOSS compared
with proprietary software solutions for use in African
education, paying particular attention to the
economic factors that need to be considered by
governments, officials and educators in determining
the software environments that they will develop or
finance.
Economic evaluation of Free and
Open Source software (FOSS)
solutions for African education.
IMFUNDO is the team within DFID (UK
Department for International Development) which
creates partnerships to deliver ICT-based
activities supporting gender equality and universal
primary education in sub-Saharan Africa
http://imfundo.digitalbrain.com/imfundo/
Thank you for your attention
[email protected]

UNESCO activities in the field of Free Open Source Software (FOSS)

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