Hi All
FOSS-PDI (=Free and Open Source Software - Policy and Development Implications) is a fairly new (2005) discussion forum.
Pablo Mayrgrndter's e-mail below describes FOSS programs that I might be of interest to members of both WWWEDU and DDN.
Some other themes that have come up so far (either in subject lines or within people's introductions):
Community radios
Open Knowledge Network
Open Source telephony
Burrokeet (? http://www.burrokeet.org/ a kind of FOSS Office suite? haven't checked it yet)
FOSS in Africa
e-learning environment
e-democracy
cheers
Claude
-- Claude Almansi www.adisi.ch
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [FOSS-PDI] Hello/FOSS software I would present to the world. Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 01:36:44 -0500 From: Pablo Mayrgundter Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Hi,
My name is Pablo Mayrgundter. I'm a software developer in Jersey City, NJ, USA.
I've just got up to date on the threads in this list and would like to jump into the software side of things.
There's a lot of great free and open software out there, but like many things in the world of information, it's just as important to have a good information as voluminous information.
If I could configure a single machine to donate to civic centers in towns around the globe, in addition to the standard operating system and productivity tools, I would include the following software -- customized and localized for as general use as possible:
## World Visualizations
This is a somewhat offbeat way to start this list, but consider this. While we may all be separated by language, history and politics, we can all share a sense of wonder at beholding our our world, and finding our place in it. Not only does this help bring us perspective on our inter-relations, but it's fun! Remember, people are still learning to use computers, and the best learners are the young. Visualizations beat text any day (I know, I've tried!).
- Celestia: http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/ Screenshots: http://www.loyno.edu/~wdvalade/celestia/ Celestia allows the user to orbit Earth and then fly around the solar system and even zoom to different stars and totally out of our galaxy. Earth is displayed with a high resolution map, and realistic scenes of the night sky can be made by setting time and location correctly. The user interface is poor, so try the demo with the "D" key. Celestia needs i18n and platform compatibility work.
- NASA's WorldWind: http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/ WorldWind focuses Celestia's view from the sky down to the Earth. Pick any location on Earth and zoom from orbital level to detailed land levels. This application would give people the opportunity to contextualize their place in the world in a way that would be visually recognizable to locals.
## Communication
- GNU Radio: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/ I saw a thread here asking about community radio packages. I don't know if it was asking about broadcast, but GNU Radio allows one to turn a server-class machine into the main signal processor for a radio station, so all you need in addition is relatively simple hardware, and you're up and running a radio station. This means a radio broadcasting station becomes much less expensive to construct, maintain and upgrade. This project is still pretty techy, but they say things are working and I've seen talk about deploying this in developing areas as a cost-saving alternative to more expensive equipement. There's also discussion on their site about using the same mechanisms for television, cellular and wireless networks. Making this software handle these applications, easy to use and internationalized would, I imagine, be a huge boon to developing areas. Heck, it would be a huge boon to my neighborhood :)
## Reference & Language
- Wikipedia: http://wikipedia.org/ Wikipedia is my new favorite site on the net. Anyone can log in and edit Encyclopedic entries on whatever they want, and many languages have done quite a job already of fleshing it out. Take a look at the main page for # of entries and try browsing around if you've never seen it. If you see anything that needs improving, pitch in! People around the world should be in touch with this effort.
- Unicode/GUCharMap: http://gucharmap.sourceforge.net/ Until we have universal translators, Unicode is the next best thing. It's a single character mapping for every character in every supported language's script. And though I'm sure there's some language scripts that have been left out of the Unicode spec, there can't be many. Like the world visualization tools, Unicode is a great way to show people some real evidence of the world around them, and encourage communication in something besides English! Additionally, older operating systems use font sets that are mutually incompatible. Spreading Unicode soon will increase the compatibility of documents written in various languages with systems elsewhere around the world. Clear handling of text is the key to good inter-cultural communications, and GUCharMap gives you that control.
## Sciences - Graphing Caculator: http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/ When I was growing up, a graphing calculator was the only tool required besides pencil and paper to take part in advanced math and science courses. Again, visualization is very important to learning abstract ideas!
- WEKA: http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/ This application is more academic, but is really quite powerful for anyone utilizing or studying statistics on real-world problems. It's basically the best datamining tool I've come across that's available for free and that is reasonably easy to use. Datamining is a fast-growing field, and has many practical applications. Check out the datasets linked on that page. Example applications include weather analysis, pathology, text classification, species identification, labor analysis, metalurgy, etc..
Anyways, I could go on.. multimedia applications, community bulletin boards, games...
I quite enjoy the idea of working on this project should anyone be interested.
Cheers, Pablo Mayrgundter http://freality.org/~pablo/
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