As a part of GRNET’s and E-Business Forum’s joint effort to promote the use of Information Technology in the education, the public sector and the SMEs, they launched an initiative to advance, lobby and help deployment of Free Software / Open Source Software (hereafter: FS/OSS) in these three main areas.

In this direction, they have already performed development, localization and dissemination tasks such as:

– Cooperation with Greek official institutes for research related to the Greek language, in order to create tools and word-lists for use in FS/OSS and the accompanying localization efforts

– Creation of infrastructure (cooperative development environment) and web sites for FS/OSS

– Cooperation with companies and individuals, both in recompensation and voluntarily schemes, to localize certain software and author extensive user guides for respective projects, such as:

– Dissemination activities.
a two-day workshop was held on June 2002, addressed to developers and public-bodies decision makers (different sessions).
Invited speakers included high-profile guests such as Richard Stallman and Matthias Ettrich.

– Promotional activities like 150.000 OpenOffice.org CDs with the highest circulation Greek newspaper (Ta Nea) on May 2003. Hundreds of Knoppix CDs have also been given away during the InfoSystems IT show, in September 2003.

In this course, GRNET with E-Business Forum are organizing another series of workshops, to be help in Athens, Thessaloniki (Salonica), Patras and Heraklion.
These events will be addressed to developers and end users only, with a mere focus on university students. The dates initially set for the events are Monday, April 26th (Athens) and Tuesday, April 27th (Thessaloniki, Patras,Heraklion). It is our intention to have all invited speakers give a presentation in Athens, and 1 or 2 distinct ones to give a talk in each of the three other cities.