Open Source Software for Peace Corps Volunteer? 14
yemanja forwards along a request for a friend: "Justin Wiley, a young friend of mine is running an 'open source lab' in the Phillipines as a Peace Corps volunteer. He'd like to ask this question of Slashdot: 'Rhe NGO I am working with primarily supports governmental bodies. We are trying to convert them over to Open Source software, and have done so in some areas like putting Mandrake, Open Office, and Mozilla on all the desktops of the national economic development authority. However, it would be useful to have a body of applications providing more specific gov't. purposes. I'm looking for Open Source packages that can do things useful for the government, like inventory control, customer management, auditing, content-management, project management/monitoring, security, and so on. If I can make some of the kids into experts in these areas, it will be easier to get them a job in government, and easier to work in Open Source software if there are people trained in using and operating it. If you run into anything like that, let me know!' I know that cities like Munich have converted to Open Source, but I wonder if anyone on Slashdot has experience with this sort of question and can provide Justin with some specific suggestions that might be useful."
Government Forge (Score:3, Informative)
Geek Corph (Score:5, Informative)
Alex.
Seems to me (Score:4, Insightful)
My suggestion would be to emphasize tools: scripting languages, SQL, XML, PHP, a GUI toolkit... (I'd suggest Qt, for a variety of reasons, but let's leave that flamewar for another time.) That seems like it will build their careers and the PI's IT capacity far more than teaching them how to use something randomly pulled off Sourceforge or Freshmeat.
Kenya (Score:2)
I suggest teaching apache/php/mysql. Its a decent start to programming and athough clunky useful in industry.
Most large scale applications are custom built, so its hard to just drop in somethine. SAP/PeopleSoft have a very expensive/ non trivial install procedure ($$$/ Months to years..)
Real projects (Score:2, Informative)
Government Zombies (Score:1, Funny)
You want help to turn a promising generation of children into government workers? What are you, some kind of, of, Progressive? Oh, you said Peace Corps, of course that's it. Nevermind.
OpenMap (Score:2)
Of course a full blown GIS would be eve more useful, but GRASS is not for the faint of heart.
A few suggestions (Score:1, Informative)
/* inventory control, customer management, */
Well Compiere (you can get it from Sourceforge)
/* auditing, */
I don't know of any financial auditing packages, but if you mean security auditing, tools (like tripwire) are installed by default on most distros.
/* content-management, */
I've only used roll-your-own, but I know that Sourceforge is brimming with this stuff.
/* project management/monitoring, */
There's a program called Mr. Project that may do this for you. Sourceforge offers a web-based a
Project Management ala dotproject. and my 0.02 (Score:3, Interesting)
But at my newest job they are using dotproject. Works well, has Gant charts. If only I had it back then. Muhuhahhahhahaha!
Seriously, check it out. www.dotproject.net
As for the rest... Just my
The fun part won't be finding and/or implementing the software. The fun part will be convincing the folks to use it and making peace with whatever biases they have. It's not as cliche as "They'll choose Microsoft when given the choice" but more like "If they feel they have a choice, they will want to exercise it." And what they want may not necessarily be what is out there, open source, and that works reliable.
So coming up with a list of applications that they should learn is kinda tough. It's going to change no matter what.
Let the fun begin!
Good basic linux skills will get them farther, let the vendors drive for a particular choice. Just make them good compu learners...
open source accounting software (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.sql-ledger.org
Based on ostgres and perl, runs on linux or windows.
*****
Compiere, for complex supply-chain management, CRM type stuff. Compiere is free, and you can download oracle for free for development/trial mode, but if you want to use it in production you have to shell out for an oracle license. $1500 I believe. There has been much talk of making compiere db independent, so you could plug in mysql or sql-server or whatever you want, rather tha