UKTP.net

The Internet Freedom Movement (IFM) has issued a video bulletin[1] exhorting users of the internet to defend their freedoms by any means necessary. This comes in the wake of recent news that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is due to be finalized by key world players this September.[2]

WIPO Director General Francis Gurry has welcomed the adoption by member states of the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) of a new legal instrument that seeks to protect African traditional knowledge and folklore.

Public administrations considering a move to open source, should make sure they involve universities and IT companies, said Martin Garcia, head of IT at the department for Infrastructure and Transport at the Valencia regional administration, yesterday at a conference in the city of Guadalajara, Spain.

The European Commission is planning to spend 3.344 million Euro until 2016 to continue the services provided by its projects - such as OSOR.eu and Semic.eu - on open source and on electronic data exchange.

Diara, an open source application allowing public administrations to us the Internet to organise polls, referendums, petitions, public inquiries and allowing to record electronic votes using electronic ID cards, is developed with support from the city of Tallin and the College of Technology in Estonia.

The European Union's open source licence, (European Union Public Licence, EUPL) is being used more and more.

An international team of software developers specialising in medical systems is working on a hospital information system.

Ecolo, a green political party in Belgium, is planning to complete its move to a complete open source desktop system by the end of 2011.

A UK government's decicion to use ODF (Open Document Format) for its electronic documents, would help public administrations overcome vendor lock-in for office applications, says Liam Maxwell, councillor for Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead.

Running from 2006 to March 2010, the IPCity project aimed to use technology in various applications to stimulate greater engagement with city environments in the EU, leading to the generation of ideas about how the city should be developed.