Governments get OSS resource centre

University of the Western Cape (UWC) PHD student, Nico Elema, is the driving force behind a project to provide governments with up-to-date open source software information.

As one of the outputs of his current PHD research at UWC, Elema launched the GOV-OSS-RC portal in August this year. Today the portal is a comprehensive and growing resource for government’s around the world to find information on OSS best practices as well as data on other government initiatives.

Elema says the aim of the resource center is to provide “information on free, open source software for interested stakeholders in all levels of government”.

He says that while there is a lot of open source information available it is has not been consolidated, something that he hopes to do with the GOV-OSS-REC site.

The site provides information on research, downloads, publications, organisations, media and OSS support and service providers, he said.

Elema says that right now there are no sponsors of the portal - it is a “labour of love” - but that there are a number of key organisations endorsing the project. The portal is currently endorsed by UWC’s department of information systems and its Free Software Innovation Unit (FSIU) which is to help with the ongoing development of the site. Other endorsements include those from FOSSFA, WOUGNET, OSS-Institute and more recently GOSCON08.

Elema says that FOSSFA (Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa) has also discussed the establishment of regional resource centers to identify local needs such as one linked to the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT in Accra, Ghana.