The administration of the Bolzano region in Italy will discuss its IT strategy with advocates of free and open source. The director of the IT department has accepted an invitation by the regional Linux user group (Lugbz) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).

As I already explained in another article file formats are extremely important: unless, at least in Public Administrations (PAs), only open file formats are used, serious amounts of public money can go to waste, important public digital documents may become unreadable and private citizens or businesses may be forced to useless expenses if they want to interact with PAs.

The administration of the Italian city of Bologna has almost completed its move to OpenOffice. Most of the 3600 PCs now run this open source suite of office applications. The administration is planning to move more applications to open source, aiming to become less dependent on specific IT vendors.

One survey - however biased it may be - claims and demonstrates that Italy's adoption of Free software is well ahead of the rest of the world

"An appeal won on 24 September 2008 against the decision of the Italian court enforced on 10 August 2008 ordering the seizure of The Pirate Bay (TPB) in Italy, has been reversed by the Italian Court of Cassation..."

"Les than two weeks left - the GuIT meeting 2009 will be held on October 17, 2009 at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. GuIT (Gruppo Utilizzatori Italiani di TeX) is the Italian TeX User Group, inviting to the 6th annual conference about TeX and LaTeX..."

"Following the success of the previous conference in 2006, we are delighted to announce that the 2nd "CULTURAL HERITAGE on line" conference will be hosted by Teatro della Pergola in Florence in December 2009. This conference aims to explore, analyze, and evaluate the state of the art and future trends in user communities and cultural contents..."