Yesterday I participated in a workshop on “”Open Standards for ICT Procurement: Sharing of Best Practices”. This was organised by PWC for the European Commission’s DG CNECT, and forms part of an EC-funded project on “Guidelines for public procurement of ICT systems“. The invitation read: Under Digital Agenda, the European Commission commits itself through Action Read more »
The year is almost over, and it’s reporting season. Here’s a sneak peek at list of things we achieved in 2014. A full report will follow shortly. We want to keep doing these things, and more, in 2015. To continue operating at our current level in 2015, we will need €420,000. We have already secured Read more »
Today, the European Parliament organised a conference to inform MEPs about the IT services available to them. It featured a panel discussion led by Adina Valean, the new EP Vice President in charge of ICT, with a contribution from Giancarlo Villela, the director of the EP’s IT department. After the panel discussion, I got the Read more »
Today, Brussels-based lobby organisation ECIS released a report on “cloud” computing and interoperability. It highlights the importance of open standards, open data formats, and open interfaces in a world where more and more of our computing happens on machines owned and operated by other people. The report is aimed at public and private organisations that Read more »
When you’re a public body, how do you evaluate Free Software solutions, and how do you procure them? Recently I’ve been getting this question fairly regularly. Here are the main resources I point people to. First stop: A guideline from the European Commission on “public procurement of open source software“. This answers most of the Read more »
Several interesting conversations resulted from my visit to the European Christian Internet Conference. One of them was with a pastor (and computer scientist) who works in the church administration of the Rhineland in Germany. He shared with me a draft strategy (pdf, in German) to move the churches in his region towards Free Software. He Read more »
Telling lots of different kinds of people about Free Software is one of the parts I like best about my work with FSFE. Recently I was invited to deliver a keynote at the European Christian Internet Conference. It’s a small event that has been running for a long time. A core group of ca. 50 Read more »
Free Software needs a strong community. If we fail to attract everyone willing to work for Free Software, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot. Also, we’re probably not being as friendly and open towards people as we should be, morally speaking. That’s a serious failure for a community where morals matter. The low share of Read more »
The other day I wrote about how even if you don’t use Gmail, Google still ends up with access to a lot of your personal conversations. My own analysis was pretty poor imitation of the interesting work done by Benjamin Mako Hill. Where he used Python and R, I just fumbled around with Mutt’s limit Read more »
Is your privacy important to you? And if so, are you running your own mail server? Good. But if your concern is to keep Google’s tentacles out of your personal conversations, that’s not enough. Benjamin Mako Hill published a fine project he undertook over the weekend. He wrote a bunch of scripts to check how Read more »