Open Source Hub
South Dublin County Council use fit for purpose best in class solutions to assist us discharge our services to the citizen of the county. No matter what project we embark on we will ask ourselves two questions; (a) is there an open source solution which could help us, and (b) is such a solution appropriate to the needs of the project. Beyond open source - the council also utilise free on-line services (again where appropriate) for media and content distribution.
We have successfully integrated the use of on-line services such as scribd (content presentation and distribution) and tubmlr (that which this humble blog is prepared on) to projects as profound as the innovation week or indeed the County Development Plan process. Our colleagues in the south dublin county library service are champions in this regard. They have blazed a trail with blogs and tweets way in advance of any corporate direction. As they put it themselves “At South Dublin County Libraries we like to think differently. That’s why we use Open Source software – which is free to use software developed by global on-line communities”.
During Innovation Week the County Library are taking the opportunity to showcase how open Source Technologies are used. The ‘Open Source Hub’ which runs throughout the week will let interested people sample how open source looks and works in practice. You can join in on the Digital Floor of the County Library in Tallaght, one of Ireland’s 21st century public libraries and check out Open Office, Mozilla Firefox and Drupal website builder!
During turbulent financial periods government and industry must ask themselves - why pay for software when best in class can be free to you?
Open source represents more than free software. There is community spirit which on the larger open source projects, is usually spread across the globe in a distributed coalition of interested individuals - some interested in using the product of the open source efforts, others interested in being to the fore in the development of such projects, others who are interested in helping others innovate and implement with the open source initiatives.
Be sure to drop in and see what you can do with open source. The open source hub runs at the County Library HQ in Tallaght during innovation week from 14th – 20th October, 2009.
