A consortium of socially-aware free and open source software advocates was launched on Software Freedom Day, September 16 2006, at the University of the Philippines. Commonly referred to as BUKAS (new open formation), it consists of seventeen organisations, which share the view that FOSS has become a political imperative in light of the actual Filipino “intellectual property” regime. “Information technology should make us not just a nation of users but a nation of creators. This can be done much better with Linux,” a founding member declared at the launch.

A strawberry field is basically kind of a horizontally connected strawberry network,” says Mihály Bakó, when trying to explain how his environmental non-governmental organisation came up with its name: Strawberrynet. APCNews met with APC’s Transylvanian member in Sfantu Gheorghe, Romania, in early September 2006. Read the details about ICT policy, Romanian style.

A new prize, the APC Chris Nicol FOSS Prize, was launched on Friday August 25 in Mexico City. The biennial $4,000 USD prize will be awarded to a person or group doing extraordinary work to make it easy for ordinary computer users to start using free and open source software (FOSS).

When Partha Sarkar of APC-member BytesForAll decided to turn the South Asian volunteer-driven network he co-founded into an even more participative affair, he opted for Drupal. And Sarkar and company are not alone. Other members of the APC network are also finding Drupal is a convenient tool for setting up and activating online communities.

From here to where? And how? APC’s April Bangladesh consultation on communication policy, which brought in diverse people from across South Asia, helped to connect ideas that nudge forward ideals of freedom-in-computing in this populous part of the planet. One of the sessions that participants themselves felt the need to look at, are the critical issues facing free and open source software.

Gaming is very popular with the children and youth. So what better way is there to introduce computing and free and open source software (FOSS) to kids, than through fun didactic software?

Some of Drupal’s features include multi-user editing, an advocacy component, flexibility and configurability, multi-lingual support, a strong and dedicated developer community, as well as a vibrant community of users.

The Foundation for Media Alternatives was one of the groups that pushed to have a community-focussed track at the latest Linux World Philippines. The programme listed themes like free and open source software in government, health and education. The FMA then helped create an open coalition. More recently, this APC member has also backed up a bid to set up a regional node of the International Open Source Network.

Indian language computing solutions in free/libre and open source software is "doing fine" but needs better documenting and packaging. It also needs to find sufficient numbers of users. There is a lot of potential for regional, cross-country cooperation in this field in South Asia, a region in urgent need of solutions to its computing challenges. This interview with Sarai.net, the Delhi-based new media initiative, also self-defined as a "space for research, practice and conversation about the contemporary media and urban constellations", explores these challenges.