Participative democracy relies increasingly on the ability of citizens and stakeholders to access public information and to communicate with officials and elected politicians electronically. To highlight the impact of open standards on democracy, the Greens/European Free Alliance organized a half day event at the European Parliament in Brussels on April 17, 2008.

Kerala is all set to become the first state in the country to completely banish Microsoft and allow only GNU/Linux free software to be used in the mandatory IT test at the state SSLC examinations that half a million students took in March. Till last year, they could take the exam using either free software or the Microsoft platform. Not anymore'.

With out taking sides on the matter and only focusing on the fact that yahoo will give confidential information to a government, in this particular case to a foreign government. In April 2004, the Chinese journalist Shi Tao used his Yahoo! email account to send a message to a U.S.-based pro-democracy website. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison

"THE EU COMMISSION has warned that France’s quest for universal internet access would be hampered by a presidential proposal to tax broadband usage. The plan is to supplement the licence fee for public broadcast television and radio which has a funding shortfall due to the decision to abolish advertising in order to 'raise standards'..."

You might still recall a post from the other day which deals with corruption in procurement. It focused on the British public sector. “Corruption,” you say? That’s how it seems anyway. Newham now rebuts, but the rebuttal doesn’t seem to lend much credibiily

Last week we saw Microsoft coming under fire in Europe. When one talks about the EU, however, there’s a distinction to be made. Brits tend to think of the EU as continental Europe, whose attitude and response to Microsoft has been lukewarm for quite some time, unlike Britain which happily lets itself be shackled by Microsoft.

"Prodded by the music industry and government, some Internet service providers are reluctantly exploring the adoption of an old-fashioned shunning ritual as the ultimate 21st century punishment: banishing errant online users.

The NSW Department of Education has put Microsoft on notice after it agreed to extend its software licensing agreement with the company for just one year instead of renegotiating a new three-year contract.