By chance I’ve spent some time recently consulting with OSS Watch in Oxford, UK. Ross Gardler and his team provide Open Source advice and guidance free of charge to UK higher and further education organizations. Apart from the chance to visit Oxford a couple of times (and loving it more each time), it has allowed to me to gain insight into how Open Source is viewed within the UK education community.
In particular it has been interesting to see how efforts in the UK are growing to provide children in schools and students in universities with the knowledge they need to understand Open Source and have the qualifications many companies now require when recruiting new employees. It is still proving difficult to make sure young people have enough knoweldge (both practical and theoretical) around Open Source and OSS Watch are constantly looking for additional ways of doing this.
So, now I would be interested in hearing about similar initiatives in other countries – or indeed people interested in establishing or building out similar initiatives as I think this will become increasingly important as we see Open Source adoption growing everywhere.
