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It took a little while but finally I updated the ROSI- Romanian Open Source and Free Software Initiative presentation page. We planed to release the full portal but although me and Roberto are putting a lot of efforts in that directions, it seems that our busy schedule is not allowing us to advance as we wish.

Anyway, we took a step forward: after the last two months of discussions we had on Basecamp where ROSI members and supporters discussed the initiative, I wrote together all the ideas and now we can provide a clear reflection about how this project started, what are we doing, our goals, and what we plan to do for the future.

For all of you who are interested in Open Source, Free Software, Digital Civil Society, open business models and more, you are invited to find more details about ROSI on its website www.rosi.ro.

Finally, thanks to Dave who helped me to give a nice English shape to the copy there

Carmen Holotescu, one of the first ROSI members, is talking about Open Source and Romanian education in an interesting interview with CHECKpoint eLearning/INFObases GmbH:

“The main benefits of open source software as concluded by UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning are adaptable functionality, lower overall costs, vendor independence (increases choice, competition and transparency), adherence to open standards, the software’s position as a public good, interoperability, and security.

The recommendations of the EU for educational policies are to avoid lifelong vendor lock-in in educational systems by teaching students skills rather than specific applications and by encouraging participation in FLOSS-like communities. This adds value to the skills learnt by students, such as a positive attitude towards information technology that favours the ability to create and actively participate and collaborate rather than just consume. ”

“…teaching students skills rather than specific applications…” - very good point; maybe somebody from Romanian government will get the idea..

Read the whole article: http://www.checkpoint-elearning.com/article/4467.html

Last time I promised to come with an interesting story, here it is:

A week or two ago I went to buy lunch outside my office building and I had the curiosity to enter in a building nearby, where, on the entrance was a tag saying “Free Geek” and and sticker with Ubuntu

So what I found inside: a pretty big deposit full of computers, monitors and other parts surrounded by a frantic activity. I said hello to one of the persons there and we start to chat.
This is how learned about one of the most admirable initiatives I found in the last time.
My chat partner was David Repa and he explained to me on short what is all about: they are a group of Free/Open Source Software enthusiasts who volunteer to recycle old computers, everything that can be reusable, by receiving it from people who instead to throw them on the garbage, donate it to them.
Although this sounds familiar, there are a few points that impressed me: they take the old computers and rebuild reliable PC from that parts, cleaning all on the hard drives and installing only Free Software!. Anybody can come and help, and if he donates 24 hours of work he will receive a free system. Every week, they held seminars about using Free Software and people can come and ask questions and find the best practices. They also grant hardware for non-profit organizations. And finally, they are recycling the waste to the recycling centers.
So, what do you think? Sounds great, isn’t it?! And they are really doing what they mean, I saw this with my eyes.

No more words, I suggest you to check their website http://freegeekvancouver.org.

I hope this would provide inspirations for IT Romanians people and mostly for ROSI group members and other Opens Source and Free Software enthusiast although what are doing those guys here is an example for all of us about what means care about community, collaborations - a clean and open society:

“We provide a place for people to share technology, and to work together building healthier, more empowered communities. We want to see transparency, accountability, and sustainability become the norm in our industry and in our neighborhoods.”
Free Geek Vancouver

Well done friends!

I just found from Yovko about one of the most interesting projects in the last time: SimpleStudio.

The project is presented for now only in Bulgarian, but I played a little bit there. True beautiful pictures! On the other hand, because on the web I know lots of photo blogs and sites focused on this theme, I asked Yovko why is this different, why people would use SimpleStudio and not flickr for example. Here is the answer:

” Flickr is just an online community… or communities…
SimpleStudio is offline project - we have professional studio equipment - mobile, compact speedlights, reflectors, soft boxes, etc. Every quarter we will choose 2-3 young photographers and will give them all the equipment for free to realize their ideas - it is not easy to be young and to buy, rent or use studio equipment… Everybody can have a chance to work with SimpleStudio if he/she is agree to license the images under Creative Commons license… So we will provoke people to try free culture, creative commons licenses, generating free photos…”

Brilliant and generous! I take my hat off. I would like to see this kind of initiatives in Romania too, unfortunately we have still a lot to learn and understand about what really free culture means, as our Bulgarians neighbors did.

Find more about this project and what Yovko is trying to do on http://simplevisions.org/index.php?x=about

Soon I’ll come with another story about initiatives and true community projects, this time from here, a few blocks from my office building, in Vancouver.

I just found from one of the ROSI members (Laurentiu Buzdugan), that Romanian Standard Association (ASRO) was one of the few countries representatives who approved without any comments the Microsoft OOXML proposal! (For those who are not familiar with it, there is a quite straight forward explanation on Wikipedia about OOXML and ODF.)
Can you imagine? No comments or nothing, they just say “OK, we totally agree with Office Open XML”!

So if somebody is telling me that Romania is not under the total influence of Microsoft, I would laugh in his face. (There are tons of articles about how MS is “promoting” their proposal, I found this one interesting, and this one, or this..)

What can we do? Maybe start to explain for everybody - even to ASRO - why OOXML is bad and why ODF is good?

I invite all of you who are open minded to promote ODF and post FSF Europe logo+link on their sites and bogs, here is the text and the code I grabbed from them:

” Put this banner on your web page and use it to link to the six questions on MS-OOXML that are still unanswered:

<a href="http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-questions" mce_href="http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-questions" border="0"><img src="http://fsfeurope.org/graphics/msooxml_small.png" mce_src="http://fsfeurope.org/graphics/msooxml_small.png" /></a>

”
Ah, and check this site too http://www.noooxml.org/ .