SIGOSSEE held its first project meeting in February, in Bremen, Germany. Following the meeting the Institut Technik und Blildung, the German partners in the project, issued a brief press release to the local daily newspaper, the Bremen Courier. The story was duly shortened to little more than a few paragraphs and appeared on the weekly feature on university news.

Whilst this may not have caused much local attention, it did get picked up by a number of the German language on-line news services. The result has been a flood of enquiries from the German speaking world, both from individuals wanting to join the Open Source Special Interest Group (SIG) and from newspapers and other media representatives wanting themselves to run features on education Open Source Software. Joachim Dittrich, who leads the project for Bremen, has been kept busy over the last month, responding to requests for interviews.

This does suggest that there is phenomenal interest in Open Source and also a shortage of information. It also shows the potential for the SIGOSSEE and the associated JOIN project. However, it also shows that the projects will have to stay clearly focused, given the present limitations on resources.

A (loose) English language translation of the press release is provided below for other who may wish to adapt it for local use.

Open Source goes Education

Open Source Software poses growing competition for the big software companies. Linux, for example, is taking a big market share from Microsoft in server applications and is even overtaking them in public administration, at least in Germany. There are similar developments in other areas with the growth of the information society including the use open source for e-learning for the education and training market.

At the Institute Technology and Education at the University of Bremen, Germany, experts

in information technology and education and training, practitioners and scientist from nine European countries met in order to discuss the pros and cons of software with freely available source code for education and training applications.

At the start-up workshop of the EU-financed project "Special Interest Group on Open Source Software in Education in Europe" (SIGOSSEE), first steps were taken to build an Special Interest Group (SIG) to investigate and support the use of open source software in education. The SIG group is open to anyone interested throughout the world. Members of three other associated projects from Germany, Estonia and Austria also attended the meeting.