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
How can governments ensure that they get their money’s worth when they embrace open government reforms? Ongoing research suggests that open government reforms—those that promote transparency, participation, and accountability—may lead to better development outcomes if properly implemented by governments. However, governments must navigate the myriad of initiative options as they strive to improve citizens’ quality … Read more
Today’s topic for Copyright Week is “You Bought It, You Own It, You Fix It”, which means that copyright law shouldn’t interfere with your freedom to own your stuff however you see fit: to repair it, tinker with it, recycle it, use it on any device, lend it, and then give it away (or … Read more
The WikiCup is a championship that has taken place every year on Wikipedia since 2007. The Cup is played and won by skill of editing. The purpose of the Cup is to encourage content improvement and make editing on Wikipedia more fun. The 2017 WikiCup begins on January 1; signups close on February 5. The … Read more
As the population of cities is expected to grow, from being home to just over 50% of the world’s population in 2015 to 60% by 2030, finding innovative solutions to improving urban resilience becomes even more pressing. Cities around the world are struggling under combined pressures, both manmade and natural. Whether it be population growth … Read more
After almost two years of development the new stable major release GRASS GIS 7.2.0 is available. It provides more than 1950 stability fixes and manual improvements compared to the former stable release version 7.0.5. The new version includes a series of new modules to analyse raster and vector data along with new temporal algebra functionality.More … Read more
