The newly elected European Parliament will include at least 33 members from 7 member states that have pledged their support to free software, according to advocacy groups April and the FSFE. The provisional results of their campaign show that of these, 17 come from France, 7 from Germany, 3 from the Netherlands, 2 from Italy, 2 from Spain, 1 from Belgium and 1 from Portugal.

Free and Open Source Software in Taiwan has made impressive strides thanks to the work of the 'ezgo' team. They have put together a pre-configured set of Free and Open Source software that makes it easy for teachers and students to get up and running. The New Taipei City government has decided to replace Windows with GNU/Linux on 10,000 PCs for elementary schools.

Rakshasa is a creation of Jonathan Brossard to backdoor hardware. It's OS independent and fairly permanent: you can even swap your hard disk and it will prevail. it uses Coreboot and other free software packages to work its magic. Are you sure what lives in your firmwares?

When it comes to government IT in 2013, GitHub may have surpassed Twitter and Facebook as the most interesting social network. “We’re reaching a tipping point where we’re seeing more collaboration not only within government agencies, but also between different agencies, and between the government and the public.”

The computer code sharing site GitHub's first government liaison says he hopes to be a bridge between the government and open source communities on legislation and regulations, not just code. "What if that entire legislative process happened in some sort of open, collaborative way? What if the congressman said ‘hey, the bill’s on GitHub and you’re welcome to make a pull request?’"

This summer, on June 1-2, 2013, residents in cities across the Nation will join together to improve their communities and governments as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. A number of Federal agencies, including NASA, the Census Bureau, and the Department of Labor, are participating by offering specific challenges for hackers to work during the event.

The federal government of Belgium will implement Open e-Prior, the open source electronic invoicing software developed by the European Commission's ISA program. It should be up and running by September and should handle a quarter of all invoices sent by suppliers by June 2014.