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

Transcription

1 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

2 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 : 610 Million Dollars Extra- budgetary resources: 400 Million dollars

3 UNESCO's mission Standard-setting action : the preparation and adoption of international instruments and statutory recommendations. Expertise: provided to Member States for their development policies and projects in the form of "technical co-operation". Prospective Studies: what forms of education, science, culture and communication for tomorrow's world? The advancement, transfer and sharing of knowledge: relying primarily on research, training and teaching activities.

4 How FOSS fits into UNESCO's mission and objectives. The Medium-Term Strategy for 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.

5 How FOSS fits into UNESCO's mission 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.

6 How FOSS fits into UNESCO's mission 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.

7 How FOSS fits into UNESCO's mission 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.

8 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.

9 UNESCO Free Software Portal The UNESCO Free Software Portal was developed and published in November 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.

10 UNESCO Free Software Portal 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. ( ).

11 UNESCO Free Software Portal 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.

12 UNESCO Free Software Portal 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, and other standard applications. German government publishes open source guidelines. A guide to migrating the basic software components on server and workstation computers.

13 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-French- Spanish) version of the Free Open source Greenstone Digital Library software suite.

14 Greenstone Digital Library 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.

15 Greenstone Digital Library 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.

16 Greenstone Digital Library 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.

17 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 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.

18 Virtual Laboratory Toolkit The Toolkit provides an extensive set of free (Free Open Source Software) tools for: person-to 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 to-equipment (P2E) communication.

19 Virtual Laboratory Toolkit 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)

20 Virtual Laboratory Toolkit 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.

21 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, June 2001). Free Software International Forum (Porto Alegre, Brazil, May 2001) Free Software Regional Meeting (Montevideo, Uruguay, Meeting (Montevideo, Uruguay, June 2001

22 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.

23 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.

24 UNESCO's activities related to FOSS to be implemented in 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.

25 UNESCO's activities related to FOSS planned for 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, which are desperately needed in UNESCO Member States (tools for information processing, data mining, learning content management system, courseware authoring tool, etc).

26 UNESCO's activities related to FOSS planned for 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.

27 UNESCO's activities related to FOSS planned for Another objective is to set up a UNESCO software development web based collaborative working 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.

28 UNESCO's activities related to FOSS planned for 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.

29 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.

30 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.

31 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.

32 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.

33 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

34 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).

35 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 ( ) 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

36 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

37 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.

38 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

39 Thank you for your attention