Dear Chris
Thank you for your letter and raising your concerns with me. I am responding on behalf of the ICT Hub steering group who discussed your letter at the last ICT Hub steering group meeting on the 26th March 2007.
The ICT Hub has a remit to raise awareness of the options available to voluntary and community organisations to enable them, with the best information and guidance available, to decide what ICT helps them meet their missions more effectively and efficiently. We are vendor (...) (continue)

Dear Nicola,
I am writing to you to express my great concern at reports that funding for developing use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) is to be cut very substantially in the next round of Capacity Builder funding administered by the ICT National Hub.
The VCS already lags greatly behind both the business sector and the public sector in the introduction of FOSS. At the same time, calls for more use of FOSS are now increasing considerably at (...) (continue)

10 desktop computers using Ubuntu Linux were distributed to VCOs in the East of England Region for testing and evaluation. The organisations involved were invited to an initial session where they were introduced to FOSS and Ubuntu Linux. They then all received a personal training session at their own premises. After three months the organisations were invited to submit an interim assessment of their use of the computers. At the end of the project they were asked to fill in a questionnaire. (continue)

This project, one of four East of England FOSS projects funded by ChangeUp, is a pilot to test the viability of a FOSS based private VOIP system for use by the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS). For this pilot project we have concentrated on providing a limited set of initial features that can be built on later. Voluntary and Community Organisations in the East of England that want to participate in using the system should contact chrisbailey@ciac.org.uk.
The initial system provides the (...) (continue)

Learning a new tool for work is always a challenge and software is no exception. Software increasingly influences the productivity and budget of the voluntary and community sector (VCS). The participants in the East of England FOSS in the VCS project, who have been using the Ubuntu GNU/Linux computers for their work for more than four months, have sent us very interesting and diverse point of view about their experience so far. It provides interesting insight about the positive and negative points so far, as well as good ideas on how to continue forwards with the project. (continue)

The past weeks have been very busy with progress in the FOSS projects related to the Voice over IP server, website development using Joomla, as well as the legal case tracking software development. (continue)

The second issue of the FOSS newletter contains answers to questions commonly asked by the participants such as: opening PDFs, copying on CDs, browsing the office network, tips from working with OpenOffice, and Access database. (continue)

Following this first week of the East of England FOSS ChangeUp project, we have already received a lot of interesting feedback. In this issue, we have decided to publish online the most interesting questions which we have discussed with some of the participants. (continue)