European Union (EU)

This 43-minute podcast recorded during the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference features Ted Dodds, CIO and Associate Vice President - IT, The University of British Columbia and Richard N. Katz, Vice President, EDUCAUSE speaking on The Adventures of Katz and Dodds: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. The slides that accompanied their presentation are also available.

The abstract from this session:

Wired is running an article on the increasing Linux-friendliness of European territorial authorities, which are switching to Linux and OpenOffice solutions for a whole range of reasons, including ease of customisation, translation and localisation. Linux and OpenOffice aren't a silver bullet, of course, there are no silver bullets in IT.

A Gendarme contacted by Wired News who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that while he was optimistic about the prospects of the Linux operating system and noted how his unit had a capable IT support staff, he was not too happy with OpenOffice. He said he missed MS Office, even though it is designed by a company run by people he considers to be "thieves."

Linux.com is reporting that the recent release of a Kurdish localisation of Ubuntu is causing tensions in Turkey.

The European Commissionis to build a European digital library able to display around six million books, photographs and films and available to all internet users by 2010.

US Internet search giant Google started an international race to build an online library when it announced plans in December 2004 to digitise books and documents from a handful of big libraries.

Since then, US Internet and software giants Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon have announced separate plans while France, upset that private companies took the lead, has pushed for the creation of a public digital library, AFP reports.

There has been a great deal of discussion and general scepticism about the fact that Microsoft has gone public with some of the documents in the European Commission antitrust case it is fighting. Microsoft says:

Transparency is vitally important in what can be a very opaque process in Brussels. We've decided to open this up so people can understand the issues.

A monitoring trustee, nominated by Microsoft but working for the Commission has called the documentation "fundamentally flawed." The documentation of the Commissions' side of the case is unlikely to be published, because it almost certainly contains agreements which third parties have with Microsoft which include confidentially clauses.

Mikko Välimäki of Helsinki University of Technology has written a paper "Copyleft Licensing and EC Competition Law" to appear in the forth coming European Competition Law Review. To quote the closing:

[I]f interpreted strictly under copyright law, copyleft licenses create an open technology basis for highly competitive derivative software markets.

This paints copyleft (open source and open content) in very rosy colours. Unfortunately I'm not close enough to the situation to know whether this is partisan or not.

It’s time to see how the new Austrian Presidency of the EU will affect European strategic thinking on ICT infrastructure and the information society. On 31 January 2006, the Section for Transport, Energy, Infrastructure and the Information Society (TEN) meets in Luxembourg. Discussion of i2010 is Item 6 on the agenda.

i2010, for those who missed it first time round, sets the EU's ICT policy framework for the next five years.

My last comment on i2010, posted more than six months ago now, was skeptical about the use of the phrase “e-inclusion”.

My problem was with the word, not the issue (I still consider “e-inclusion” to be an unnecessary and rather ugly neologism). I never for one moment doubted the importance of countering social exclusion from ICT—on the contrary, I’ve consistently maintained in this blog that it’s too easy for organizations to sideline ICT accessibility and skills development as a “special needs” issue.

Debian weekly news is reporting on the progress of the City of Munich as it continues migration to open standards and open source.

The current steps are to migrate their document management to an OpenOffice-based solution so that both the current windows clients and the new GNU/Linux clients can use it. They also shipped the first test versions of the Debian-based client to users in order to get feedback.

JISCLegal are now making their newsletter available via an RSS feed. The newsletter is entirely focused in UK and EU law and happenings.

It's not clear whether items are released to the RSS feed as they become available or batch published once the newsletter is sent.

The UK Cabinet Office recently published "eAccessibility of public sector services in the European Union" written for the EU. A report on the accessibility of websites, it found that 97% of official websites across the EU are inaccessible for disabled users in some way and 70% fail completely.

The recommendations include:

Review the incentives available to encourage the provision of accessible websites in the public service and, if necessary, consider the need for a strong legislative framework.

"Strong legislative framework" seems to imply legal consequences for creating, hosting and/or maintaining inaccessible websites. Scary.

But then the current attempts to make websites accessible don't seem to be working either.

Thanks to the JISC Legal newsletter.

Knowledge Exchange, the new pan-European ICT in higher education body have posted some documents to their website, including their Vision, Aims and Objectives and a Proposed Workplan.

The Knowledge Exchange's vision is one of greatly enhanced understanding and related gains in quality and efficiency between a set of partner nations who are responsible for promoting and developing information and communications technology to support education and research.

In particular, it is intended to add genuine value to the activities currently undertaken by a set of key bodies (the Knowledge Exchange sponsoring organisations) who have responsibility for ICT development in education and research within their nations. It aims to increase return in investment in ICT infrastructure, services and projects and through this to improve the quality of learning, teaching and research through: