The Library of Congress announced today that it is making 25 million records in its online catalog available for free bulk download at loc.gov/cds/products/marcDist.php. This is the largest release of digital records in the Library’s history. The records also will be easily accessible at data.gov, the open-government website hosted by the General Services Administration (GSA). … Read more
Five years ago, when the city of Rome hosted the very first Maker Faire Rome, the wheels were set in motion for what is now both the largest gathering of makers and most robust celebration of innovation in all of Europe. There’s no end in sight to its exponential growth. While the inaugural Maker Faire … Read more
YourDataStories is a three year innovation action, co-funded by the European Commission as part of the Horizon2020 research initiative. The project aims at offering a solution to make the ever growing amount of publicly available data from government sources broadly known as Open Government Data (OGD) more transparent and easier to handle for everyone. In … Read more
GFOSS – Open Technologies Alliance participates as a mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code. Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on introducing students to open source software development. Students work on a 3 month programming project with an open source organization during their break from university. Since its inception … Read more
Two researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) are launching the Open Patent Office, aiming to aggregate innovative ideas to defend them from being blocked by patents. Patents no longer contribute to innovation or knowledge, the two claim, and often create a loss instead of a profit. Conversely, there is a growing need for defensive … Read more
Building on the experience from last year’s successful pre-FOSDEM meeting, the Free Software Foundation Europe and OpenForum Europe recently continued the tradition of bringing together active Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) groups a day before the FOSDEM event, in order to discuss public policy related actions at both the EU and the national levels. This year, … Read more
Yesterday COMMUNIA sent a joint letter to MEPs working on the copyright reform dossier. It is supported by 34 organisations and 17 individuals, all advocates of quality education. In the letter we note our concerns on the phrasing of a new education exception to copyright, as included in the proposal for a directive on copyright … Read more
COMMUNIA, together with other advocates of quality education in Europe, has developed a letter to members of the European Parliament. In the letter we express our concerns that the proposed directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market will make things worse for education. We make recommendations that would help copyright transform into copyright fit … Read more
The UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) will renew its focus on the creation of reusable, open source software projects, says Anna Shipman, GDS’ Open Source Lead. It is a subtle shift from making source code publicly available – the default of the past five years, to creating real open source projects – getting a community … Read more
The Dutch government’s data centre in Groningen (ODC-Noord) is setting a standard for government-hosted cloud services. Its combination of OpenStack (managing virtualised machines) and CEPH (handling storage) is attracting more and more central government services. The open source solutions are proving enormously scalable, while keeping costs low. The data centre began an Openstack and CEPH … Read more
