Feb 23 2007
ClickOn – Open Source in the Voluntary Sector
For those of you who missed it, BBC Radio 4′s ClickOn technology show talked briefly about the benefits of free and open source software for the voluntary sector (open source software, unlike proprietary or licensed software, is free of charge and users can access the ‘source code’ to alter the software to meet their specific needs and to continually improve it).
The show featured Paul Cooper from Open Advantage and Annete King from Digital Birmingham talking about the how the combination of recycled PCs together with open source software has made computing more accessible and affordable for community groups in the West Midlands.
Personally, I was interested to hear about how Digital Birmingham (an initiative set up by Birmingham City Council and BT) increases access to technology by offering community groups free recycled computers running open source software and 12 months free broadband internet from BT. One of the project partners includes: the National Open Centre.
If you or you community group are using open source software, drop me a line, I’d love to hear more about it.
One response so far
Miles,
I came across this page after reading a documet about the Great Web Office Experiment.
I thought it was a good article and very accurate, however, I thought that your final conclusion. I agree wholeheartedly that internet bandwidth is not yet ready for web-based office work, but I believe that you overlooked the advantages of running many of the facilities on an internal office server. Licensing costs can be reduced, and instead of having to solve problems with individual installations, administrators/circuit riders only have to administer the server to fix problems; other PCs in the organisation will essentially be dumb terminals/thin-clients.
This should have the result of dramatically reducing electricity costs too.
My oversight (I’m sure to have some) may be that there are as yet few solutions similar in capability to zoho for document/presentation/spreadsheet usage that are available for personal server installation. Email, calendaring, addressbooks, bookmarks, file servers, photo galleries are available, in more than adequate office server incarnations.