NTEN and NOSI are co-sponsoring a series of webinars all year this year. There will be one webinar a month, covering topics from how to get support for FOSS, highlights of specific FOSS projects like Joomla and CiviCRM, how to migrate to FOSS platforms, etc.

The full series description is on the NTEN site .

As the webinars happen, we will be posting the presentations here (in Open Document Format, and PDF). (Click on the article heading to see the attached files.) Recordings of the webinars (and the presentations in Powerpoint format) are available on the NTEN site. Find links that were in the presentations here.

For those of you who are IRC aficionados, I've been hanging out at the #nosi channel on irc.freenode.net. Freenode is where most FOSS projects that use IRC have their channels. So, why not NOSI?

See you there.

NOSI took part in the Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects event that was co-sponsored by Aspiration and Idealware. A good time was had by all at this awesome event. One of the outcomes of the event was a software tool map of all of the varied tools that people used for varied parts of project management.

We've taken a subset of those tools (the FOSS tools, of course) and created a toolkit. There are quite a variety of tools available - some that were quite new to me.

We hope to work more with Aspiration and Idealware on more related to project management and FOSS.

Becta, the UK education technology agency, has published a key report on Microsoft Vista and Office 2007. It covers document interoperability and analyses the suitability of both software packages for adoption by schools and colleges.

It recommends that schools and colleges review the findings of the report before considering any large-scale investment or deployment, which are:

The key recommendations from Becta's report are:

• Upgrading existing ICT systems to Microsoft Vista or Office 2007 is not recommended and mixed Windows-based operating environments should be avoided. However, Vista should be considered where new institution-wide ICT provision is being planned.
• No widespread deployment of Office 2007 should take place until schools and colleges are sure that they have in place mechanisms to deal with interoperability and potential digital divide issues set out in the report.
• To ensure widest compatibility of files between different applications, users of Office 2007 should not save in Microsoft's new Office format (OOXML).
• Due to limitations in Microsoft's implementation of the Open Document Format (ODF) international standard, users should in the short term continue to save files in the more widely adopted .doc, .xls and .ppt formats.
• Pupils, teachers and parents should also be made aware of the wide range of free-to-use products currently available and on how to use and access them.
• The ICT industry should be facilitating easier access to 'free-to-use' office productivity software.

For more information go to:
http://news.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=35287&page=1658&catID=1633

For the full report go to:
http://publications.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=35275

There is a great review of the primer in the newest ICT Hub Circuit Rider Digest newsletter, from LASA. That newsletter, by the way, is also chock full of great information, so check it out.