GFOSS – Open Technologies Alliance has become an Associate organization of the OW2 Consortium. OW2 is an independent, global, open-source software community. The mission of OW2 is to a) promote the development of open-source middleware, generic business applications, cloud computing platforms and b) foster a vibrant community and business ecosystem. OW2 developments follow a flexible, … Read more
Elections are key milestones for democratic engagement, and referendums such as the UK’s Brexit poll are innovative ways for citizens to be more directly involved in the decision-making process. But voting provides only a limited taste of the variety of ways citizen can participate in government. The real antidote to citizens’ feeling of disenfranchisement lies … Read more
The Copyright Reform that’s being discussed by the EU now, could crush certain type of startups when they reach the ripe age of three. “We know from entrepreneurs we spoke to that they would move their business outside of Europe if this law becomes a reality,” Lenard Koschwitz, Director of European Affairs at Allied for Startups, … Read more
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
OLPC France (http://olpc-france.org ), a volunteer driven association, has just released a new version of the Sugarizer platform. Sugarizer allows the Sugar Learning Software to be used on any device. More precisely, Sugarizer is a port of Sugar – the open source learning platform distributed on the XO laptops – in web technologies. You can run … Read more
Find the time in your busy life to give back to the projects you care about. One of the most common reasons people give for not contributing (or not contributing more) to open source is a lack of time. I get it; life is challenging, and there are so many priorities vying for your limited attention. So … Read more
Civil Society Days 2017 – The Europe we strive for! In the recent past the European Union has been facing disaffection from a significant proportion of its citizens. The financial crisis, wars around Europe, terrorist attacks and the large-scale arrival of refugees have led to resurgence in national egoism. The suspension of Schengen, Brexit … Read more
On Europe Day, Access Info Europe is calling on the European Union to commit to and implement essential transparency and open government reforms to reverse the growing sense among European citizens that they are distanced from Brussels and that decisions are taken behind closed doors with little or no accountability. Access Info’s mapping, carried out … Read more
