IT: Italian government to increase use of open source in schools
The Italian government wants to increase the use of open source in schools. The Italian Ministry of Public Administration and Innovation, Renato Brunetta earlier this week announced two pilot projects in school in Rome.
The pilot projects will take place in the Scuola primaria 154 and the Enrico Fermi Institute of Technology. The pilot should encourage other schools to also increase their use of open source operating systems, office productivity tools and for email. Another goal of the pilot is to increase the use of collaboration tools, especially those developed as open source.
The two schools will be assisted by the La Sapienza University's Centre for Distance Learning (Cattid). The centre will help to define best practises and to produce manuals and guidelines. The Cattid will also help to find the best combination of IT and education, drawing on its experience in distance electronic learning.
The open source school pilots is one of two projects that Brunetta announced this week.
The minister also wants to increase document interoperability in public administrations. A pilot project will take place at the public administration of the province of Vicenza.
The provincial government will move to Sun Microsystems proprietary suite of office applications StarOffice -- based on the open source OpenOffice. The company will help with the move and will also provide training and technical support.
This pilot is meant to test the ease of changing documents to other formats and to monitor difficulties when exchanging documents with other public administrations. Results of the pilot will be published.
The two projects are part of a memorandum of understanding that Brunetta signed with Sun Microsystems on 23 June.
More information:
Memorandum of Understanding (in Italian, pdf)
School pilot project (in Italian, pdf)
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