[ossig] Birmingham Leads The Way By Establishing The National Open Centre

[Ditesh Kumar]

>From FOSS-PDI, thanks to Sunil Abraham:

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http://www.nationalopencentre.org.uk/

The UK national centre for open source and open standards is being
established in Birmingham, West Midlands. The National Open Centre (NOC)
will be a home for strategic thinking about open source and open
standards (OS&S) in the UK. For the first time the UK will debate and
develop policies to benefit from the strategic use of OS&S.

The NOC will build upon the expertise of its founding partners: the
National Computing Centre, Birmingham City Council, OpenAdvantage,
(University Central England) and Midland Open Source Technologies
(Birmingham Voluntary Services Council) and Digital Birmingham. The aim
is to found a national policy institute for open source and open
standards, a platform for ‘creating tomorrow’.

At an international level, as use of OS&S has grown, the debate around
it has matured, followed by strategic development and implementations:
most obviously around document formats, but also on the place of OS&S in
interoperable systems, public sector procurement, Digital Rights
Management, security and communications protocols. In several other
countries, such as Finland, India, and the US, national centres are
available to coordinate this kind of strategic-level thinking around
OS&S.