International workshop: Free/Libre/Open Source Software: Worldwide impact study

Brussels, April 26-28, 2006

This first international workshop of FLOSSWorld will bring together all consortium partners (17 in all), additional participants from their countries, and observers from the organisations listed as having provided letters of support to the FLOSSWorld project. Registered FLOSSWorld Observers will also participate, and a limited number of places may be available to the general public. For this workshop participation from EU governments, universities, business associations and the European Commission have been solicited.

Workshop participants will be experts representing the interests of the open source community, government, businesses, researchers and higher education institutes, as appropriate for the workshop questions. Some participants will take a more active role as specific questions are addressed, but in principle all the three research tracks below will be treated in each single workshop.

Track 1: Study of human capacity building / skills development in open source developer communities

Track 2: Study of inter-regional differences in software projects

Track 3: study of government usage/attitudes to open source and open standards/interoperability

Additional topics may be raised by the working groups, including that of gender and the role of women in open source communities. Workshops will last two days, and will involve between 50-70 persons using presentations, round tables and plenary debate talks.