ICTA expands FOSS

ICTA which has been limiting its public FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) activities to Software Freedom Day celebrations, has taken another step forward in the direction of use of FOSS for government, by organizing a conference called FOSS4Gov.

It is the second day event of the three day long eGovernment event taking place from September 29 to October 1.

ICTA has used FOSS for its major applications such as Lanka Gate and eRevenue Licence making major breakthroughs in cost saving and agile development for the government.

However all the FOSS based activities so far have taken place indoors and this is the first time ICTA is speaking on its FOSS usage in public.

FOSS4Gov is intended to bring in the CIOs (government ICT managers), FOSS industry, University students and academia into one forum to discuss how government can use FOSS for improving eGovernment in Sri Lanka.

The FOSS community based organizations such as lklug, Lanka Software Foundation and FOSS user will also participate in this conference.

The main features of the conference is the launch of the dedicated website for FOSS4Gov of which the url is www.foss4gov.gov.lk.

This website is meant to be the common forum for use of FOSS in government of Sri Lanka. It will give a forum for providing help and answers to government FOSS users by bringing in the industry support. It will also list down all FOSS products which are useful for government users.

Libre Office is the default Office suite that is coming with main Linux distributions. ICTA has been working through Danishka Naveen a software product localization expert to localized Open Office and currently all his localization output has been ported to LibreOffice.

Therefore localized LibreOffice can be downloaded and installed on Linux and MS operating Systems.

ICTA will launch the localized (Sinhala) LibreOffice at the FOSS4Gov conference making it available for all Sinhala computer users. LibreOffice will be the latest FOSS product which has been localized with the sponsorship of ICTA.