Open source experts from the public sector, SME and Plone community participated in the first Plone e-government international workshop. After two days of intense work the group decided to merge into 1 common project 3 e-government initiatives: CommunesPlone (Belgium, France), PloneGov.ch (Switzerland) and UdalPlone (Basque Country, Spain).

The Chamber of Commerce of Ferrara, the first PloneGov Italian member, invites 100 representatives from the public sector and open source experts to participate to the official launch of PloneGov in Italy on September 16, 2008.

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business -- in short, everywhere!

The Free Knowledge, Free Technology Conference (FKFT) is the first international event which will centre on the production and sharing of educational and training materials in the field of Free Software and Open Standards.

Free/Open Source software is great for Public Administrations, but Free/Open data are even more important. Making public sector information really accessible, that is publishing online raw data in open formats and under open licenses, can both improve transparency in government and foster local economical and cultural activities.

We first met Danese Cooper when she was working for Sun, where she was a major internal open source advocate and often Sun's major spokesperson to the rest of the world about open source. She's currently doing something similar at Intel, besides serving on the Open Source Initiative board and generally being a popular speaker at GNU/Linux and open source conferences.

"At the first international workshop of users of the Open Document Format (ODF) in Berlin to which the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic had invited about 150 users and political observers, Brazil and India, in addition to German cities such as Munich, emerged as leading proponents of open standards in the office area.

Colombia doesn’t usually get as much attention regarding free software in Latin America, largely because the federal government lags behind their regional neighbors in embracing open source.

"...Members of the Toledo Area Linux Users Group are celebrating International Software Freedom Day with an interactive event open to the general public at the West Toledo Branch Library on Saturday, September 15th from 12:00 noon to 3:00 PM. The goal is to promote awareness and use of Free and Open Source Software, a powerful resource available to all computer users..."