ICTA expands FOSS for Government activities through FOSS4Gov conference

In an endeavour to expand the use of free and open source software (FOSS) in Government service, the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) has organised a FOSS4Gov conference and the second day (today) of the tripartite event held at the Taj Samudra has been set apart  for this conference. ICTA has used FOSS for its major applications such as Lanka Gate and e-Revenue License making major breakthrough in cost saving and agile development for 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 mangers), FOSS Industry, University Students and Academia in a one-to-one forum to discuss how Government can use FOSS for improving e-Government in Sri Lanka.

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

Launch of FOSS4Gov website

The main feature of the conference is the launch of the dedicated website for FOSS4Gov: www.foss4gov.gov.lk.

This website is meant to be a common forum to be used by FOSS in Government of Sri Lanka. It will provide help and answers to government FOSS users by bringing in industry support. It will also list out all FOSS products which are useful for Government users.

Launch of Localised Libre Office

Libre Office is the default office suite that is coming with main Linux distributions. ICTA has been working through Danishka Naveen, a software product localisation expert to localise Open Office and currently all his localisation output has been ported to Libre Office. Therefore localised LibreOffice can be downloaded and installed on Linux and MS operating Systems.

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