North-by-South blogs about the recent conference organized by the Open World Forum in Paris, France, in Open World Forum releases the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap:

OWF organized an event in December 2008 which brought together people from across the FLOSS spectrum: programmers, advocates, corporate and small business users, hobbyists, academics and investors. OWF’s focus is the future of information technology within the context of the FLOSS revolution. One significant outcome of the 2008 event was the culmination of strategic, tactical and political discussions in the form of a roadmap through the year 2020.

Comments are welcome on the working version of the roadmap.

Also from the conference, Brazil’s success in adopting open source was highlighted as an example for other governments to follow.

The Public Software Portal of Brazil works to aggregate all the initiatives with FLOSS inside of the Brazillian government. It also connects them with the community in that it’s open to anyone (companies, individuals, etc) who want to contribute or propose a new solution. It’s an important step forward when the citizens of a country can see and contribute to the technology and the source code used by their government to serve them. This is a level of transparency that, without doubt, has become a critical element of modern democracies.

With the cost advantages and the improved government transparency it can provide, it’s high time for the USA to consider forming its own Public Software Portal to share information and best practices between federal agencies, states and local governments.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 11:29 am and is filed under Free Culture, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.