Dear All,

Many of us have been advocating for several years, the adoption of FOSS
applications and platforms in our country. FOSS related advocacy has
been gradually gathering energies, including the campaign against
software patents, including FOSS in the CBSE syllabi , suggesting a FOSS
manifesto for political parties in the recent elections etc.

However, we do have a long way to go before FOSS is taken as a default
software option. Towards this cause, a network or a coalition of
organizations working on FOSS adoption and promotion, would be able to
act more cohesively on issues and strengthen our individual efforts.
While such an initiative will be energy-intensive and time-consuming, it
would help orchestrate our advocacy for FOSS adoption. We are writing to
you to invite you to a meeting to discuss the building of such a
coalition comprising of members from academic institutions, NGOs and
CBOs, research and advocacy groups, professional associations, FOSS
enterprises, FOSS user groups, government officials, media professionals
etc and also its possible priorities.

The first meeting of this network was held in Bangalore in February 09,
when over 30 people met and discussed issues including working with
Universities in Karnataka through NRC-FOSS, to adopt FOSS, train
teachers on GNU/Linux (the Karnataka Computer learning program in
schools is on GNU/Linux), countering monopolistic and restrictive
practices in the IT sector, technical aspects such as developing local
language fonts that are Unicode compliant etc. A mailing list and a wiki
(http://fosscomm.in) have been since created.Please see the
wiki(http://fosscomm.in) for a more detailed update on that meeting and
activities post that meeting.

We now plan to continue building this coalition, with a meeting in
Delhi. We request you to join for a full-day meeting on the 4th of July
at the JNU, New Delhi (exact venue within JNU will be communicated shortly).

The proposed (draft) agenda for the meeting is as follows-
1. Reporting on the Bangalore FOSSCOMM 1st Meeting and follow up

2. “Open Standards” Follow up on the Department of IT's draft policy on
open standards (http://www.mit.gov.in/download/Policyonopensandards.pdf)
3. FOSS in Education
What the FOSS community can do to promote the use of FOSS in School
Education and Higher Education

4. Software Patents and other legal issues
a) Take up pre and post grant opposition for selected cases
b) Take up the issue of Draft Manual which deviates from the Patent Act
c) Take up with the Competition Commission, practices which seem to be
restrictive or monopolistic.

5. Building political consensus around FOSS as an important factor for
India's development

If you require accommodation, please let us know, we will try and
arrange at JNU.
The travel costs as well as the cost of stay would have to be borne by
the participants.

For those requesting accommodation, please write to the following:
Prof. Andrew Lynn lynn.andrew@... and Rajesh Kalithody -
myidrajesh@...

Any suggestion/modifications to the agenda are welcome.

Thanks,
Vinay Sreenivasa
On behalf of the Delhi Organizing Group, FOSSCOMM(National network of
the FOSS Community in India)

--

Vinay Sreenivasa
IT for Change
91-98805-95032
vinay@...

http://itforchange.net
http://public-software.in