A freely accessible knowledge web will facilitate education in the digital age

The Hague, The Netherlands, 30 June 2006

A financial contribution of one million euro from Brussels for a not-for-profit consortium lead by ISOC.nl will open the market for education and training material. High quality education material will be available for free through internet for end users, companies and institutions.

At this moment the available course materials are very much fragmented while there is an enormous need for a central access point. Everyone who wants so can access the central knowledge platform on the internet to use the available materials or contribute to it. The platform means an important impulse for the development of freely available training material, and in particular around the increasingly successful phenomenon of Free Software.

The project is realised by an international consortium of universities and knowledge organisations from Europe, Asia and Latin America. The new platform will be called SELF, which stands for Science, Education and Learning in Freedom. The platform aims to help the delayed European knowledge economy get ahead and strengthen the role of Europe in software and ICT development.

Wouter Tebbens, SELF project leader with Internet Society Nederland: "We hope to open the market with this initiative. SELF is for everybody who wants to learn or to share his or her knowledge about Free Software, like Wikipedia is for who wants to search for something. The open model of collaboration of this kind of projects is especially successful for product innovation, in particular in the field of emerging ICT technologies. Look for example at Brasil, where the national government has adopted a free software strategy and has stopped paying enormous amounts of money to mainly American software companies, and instead has started to develop local knowledge and expertise on software development. In Europe we can learn a lot from that!"

The SELF platform will be started with an international conference on the 10^th of July in The Hague in The Netherlands. For more information see: http://SELFproject.eu

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Note for the editors

For more information about the SELF project or about Internet Society Netherlands please contact one of the following persons:

Wouter Tebbens, general project leader for SELF

Tel. +31.622.500.981
Mail: w.tebbens [at] staff.isoc.nl

Michiel Leenaars, director Internet Society Nederland

Tel: +31.627.050.947
Mail: michiel [at] staff.isoc.nl

ReindeR Rustema, Member of the Board Internet Society Nederland

Tel: +31.621.224.775
Mail: r.rustema [at] board.isoc.nl

Or look at http://SELFproject.eu

About SELF

SELF is an international project that aims to provide a platform facilitating the collaboration around educational material, in particular about Free Software. SELF is started by a consortium of universities in Spain, Sweden and India, a few chapters of Internet Society and of course the Free Software Foundation.

The SELF platform will provide education and training materials, giving access to online course books, manuals, e-learning course material, instruction videos etc. Think of internet applications and office tools for education, government institutions and companies. Available materials will be centralised to provide central access to information for end users.

The platform and its contents will be open and freely accessible by anyone and participation in the production process will encouraged, comparably to the Wikipedia.org model. Development of the platform takes place among others in Europe, India and Argentina.

About Internet Society Netherlands

Internet Society is an independent association of internet professionals with thousands of members in one hundred seventy countries. In the Netherlands there's a Dutch chapter of this organisation: Internet Society Nederland (ISOC.nl), that is supported by about 800 members and a broad representation of companies , consumer organisations and public and grassroots organisations. The most important objective of the ISOC.nl is an open and reliable internet. This mission is realised among other things by organising projects, research, debates and events that contribute to a omnipresent and durable in society embedded internet. Besides, ISOC.nl provides its advice and vision – requested or not.

About Free Software and Open Source Software

The terms 'Free Software' and 'Open Source Software' refer both to the same sort of software, being software that is distributed by their authors with the freedoms to use it, copy it, adapt it and redistribute it freely. The term Free Software covers the fundamental freedoms for software users and implies the openness of the software, where open source does only refer directly to that last element. In our vision Free Software is the better term to use, as it is clearly about these fundamental freedoms and does not mislead or confuse people.

The authors of this kind of software publish the source code so others can revise and improve it, or learn from it. Many specialists and companies in this field often make their money providing services around the software, by providing support, adaptation and training. There are currently many thousands of free software applications that in quality or user friendliness are not inferior to proprietary software, or in several cases even much better – like GNU/Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice.org and The Gimp.