Contents

1. EC Review Meeting
2. SELF Platform Status
3. OpenDoc Society launched: Mare Liberum
4. SELF travels around Sweden
5. SELF in Extremadura
6. Agenda
7. About

1. EC Review Meeting

The SELF organisation has received feedback on the first periodic review meeting held mid-September during an expert review meeting with the European Commission. "The review gave an interesting picture of the project," the reviewer Alexis Monville writes. "The review was served by good quality documents and presentations." He gave assessments on various parts of the project. "The project is going well on its way. The slight delay on the development of the platform (WP6) and on the content development (WP7) is compensated by the anticipation of the dissemination (WP9) and community building (WP10) packages."

The project as a whole has made satisfactory progress according to the workplan and planned resources, and the collaboration between the Consortium Partners and overall management has been effective: "All the participants seems to work well together. The coordinator of the project manages to organise the collaboration smoothly (on-line and off-line)."

Overall, Mr. Monville found the project progress good and accepted the deliverables that have been sent in so far. He also gave a few recommendations to demonstrate the interest of the project and to clearly position the SELF platform with respect to other existing platforms in the educational market. The European Commission "is in full agreement with the content and the recommendations of the review report" and supports that the project can continue with the improvements, additions and changes detailed in the report.

2. SELF Platform Status

As mentioned above, "the slight delay on the development of the platform" received some criticism and not only from Mr. Alexis Monville. Since its official launch on September 5 the Platform has had a rather slow response time and not all necessary functions have been working properly yet. To name a few: there were problems with registration, the import script didn't function as we wanted, the author names are not yet correctly reflected [...].

Over the last few weeks our Technical Group, the developers and several partners of the Consortium, have been working really hard to improve the Platform. Right now you can create, import, export, add and recombine material. The main elements to start producing and using education material is there. As the development team is coding the last pieces, the first users have already started producing materials. Apart from that, much work is dedicated on finishing the user interface for SELF's versioning system. We have also been discussing the last steps towards moving to a new server to allow for a much better performance and internet response time. So keep an eye out for the announcement of the new infrastructure!

3. OpenDoc Society launched: Mare Liberum

The founding meeting of OpenDoc Society, an association to bring together individuals and organisations with a stake or interest in the openness and future of documents to learn from each other and share knowledge, took place on Tuesday October 23rd 2007. The programme included prominent speakers such as Frank Heemskerk (minister of Foreign Trade of The Netherlands), dr. Karel de Vriendt (Head of IDABC, European Commission), Peter Vandenabeele (FEDICT, Belgian administration) and Patrick Durusau (chair of INCITS V1 and one of the editors of the Open Document Format standard).

During the first half of the launch, Mr. Durusau compared the need for open document formats with the need for freely accessible oceans in Hugo Grotius' seventeenth century 'The Free Seas', in which he formulated the new principle that the sea was international territory and all nations were free to use it for seafaring trade. Grotius, by claiming 'free seas', provided suitable ideological justification for the Dutch breaking up of various trade monopolies through its formidable naval power (and then establishing its own monopoly). 'Mare Liberum' is now needed for the digital ocean of documents - documents should be freely navigational: free to create, revise, exchange, publicise and archive - and thus open standards are highly needed.

Closing the day, Mr. Heemskerk and Mr. Durusau officially launched the Dutch Chapter of the OpenDoc Society. The Belgium Chapter will follow on November 14th, 2007: please watch the website!

More information
Grotius & Mare Liberum

4. SELF travels around Sweden

The Free Software Foundation Europe is starting an educational tour about the SELF project in different universities and libraries around Sweden. The main goal is to create awareness of things as the Platform itself, of the idea of the Free Knowledge and Free Education and the ways that users can benefit and contribute. An effort will also be made to create a sort of a collaboration between all the institutions that will be attended so they can work together in using and updating the Platform.

The tour will begin with presentation of SELF during the exhibition Internet Days, taking place in Stockholm on the 5th and 6th of November. A separate longer presentation of SELF will also take place at The Royal Academy of Technology in Stockholm on the 7th of November, Wednesday, starting at 15:00. The same day but earlier, there will be a presentation in Uppsala from 09:00 until 11:00.

The tour will continue on the 9th of November, Friday, in Borås, starting at 13:00 in University College of Borås. Next, SELF will travel up north to Umeå, where the presentation will take place on Monday, November 12th from 15:00 to 17:00. The following presentation taking place in Sundsvall in the Mid Sweden University will be a video presentation, transmitted from Göteborg. The next two cities will be Linköping on the 20th of November, Tuesday, from 18:00 to 20:00 in Linköping University and Karlstad on the 21st, Wednesday, from 13:00 to 15:00 in Karlstad University. The tour will symbolically finish in Göteborg at The Free Software Conference Scandinavia (FSCONS), an event organised by FSFE, where as part of the program, Jonas Öberg will give a speech about SELF. People who are interested in collaborative development of any materials, are interested in education on Free Software and Open Standards, or are generally curious how SELF will be different from Wikipedia and other platforms, should find the presentation useful.

Contribution by Irina Dzhambazova, UGOT

5. SELF in Extremadura

Last month David Jacovkis form the SELF Learning Materials Team visited Extremadura, a Spanish region that has deployed a customised Debian flavour (gnuLinEx) in around 100.000 computers in high schools, healthcare centres and civil servants' desktops. Extremadura, one of the less developed regions in Europe, launched 10 years ago a regional strategy to provide its citizens access to the information society. Today, and thanks in part to the use of free software, every high school classroom has a computer for every two students, connected to the Internet even in the most remote villages.

During the visit, several interviews were conducted with the protagonists of the strategy, from its users and beneficiaries to its maximum technical and political responsibles. The aim of the interviews was twofold: spreading the word about SELF and obtaining information for an extensive article that will be published in the "2008 Open Source Jaarboek" in The Netherlands.

Contribution by David Jacovkis, UOC

6. Agenda

31 Oct - 1 Nov 2007, Jaarbeurs Utrecht
SELF: Open Source Paviljoen

• 1 nov. 11:00-12:30 Open Platformen, chaired by Wouter Tebbens
• 1 nov. 13:00-14:30 Manifest of Open Government Organisations, chaired by Wouter Tebbens

5 Nov - 8 Dec 2007, various cities

13, 14 and 15 Nov 2007, Bogotá (Colombia).

• David Jacovkis: “SELF: educating in freedom”

14 Nov 2007 , Boekentoren, Gent, Belgium

4 - 8 Dec 2007, National Science Symposium Centre, IISc, Bangalore, India

• Nagarjuna G.: “SELF Platform”

7. About

SELF News is a monthly newsletter about the SELF Project and related issues. SELF aims to be the central platform with high quality educational and training materials about Free Software and Open Standards. It is based on world-class Free Software technologies that permit both reading and publishing free materials, and is driven by a worldwide community.

Information about SELF:
http://selfproject.eu/

Consortium Partners:

• Internet Society Netherlands
• Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
• Free Software Foundation Europe
• Goteburg University
• Internet Society Bulgaria
• Fundación Vía Libre
• Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education
  

Newsletter editor:
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