S&T Collaborium.NET Web portal Simone Grassi Cisbic snc

Brief on Collaborium ● The Science and Technology (S&T) Collaborium initiative was born in year 2000, with the main aim to “help sustain economic competitiveness and scientific social progress” for developing countries ● Collaborium did about 8 on-site training (Romania, Nigeria, Perù, Venezuela, Benin) ● Collect general information and on-site training content

Why ● On-site trainings are very interesting and useful, but often, going back home from on-site trainings, the question is: how much of them will use those technologies? People can feel alone against new and complex technologies. ● Collaborium.net want to cover the need of a place (a digital one) not only to find content but where people can feel as in a community. ● Participants of on site training and all people contacted directly or indirectly will find a common place, always online, to chat, find links, retrieve content (and see that he/she is not the only one experiencing troubles installing a linux box)

goals! ● Help developing countries to use the last and most advanced IT technologies for development for free ● Create a community with people both from developing countries and from developed countries. ● Create a network of volunteers and professionals to do on-site training and schools

The Open Source Community ● The community will be created following the example of known and successful communities ● Every user need help to find the correct path of knowledge, by level and by field ● An approach from “dummies to gurus” will be used ● We want to involve people with no or few skills, but is really important to involve skilled people ● Integration with common tools needed by web communities: – Forums – Newletters – Mailing lists – Chatrooms –...

Startup ● Cisbic will use a server in Milan to host the community ● A member of Cisbic will manage some students from the University of Bologna (doing a 300 hours stage) maily to collect content and integrate tools not yet included with postnuke ● Involve people using Collaborium and ICTP knowledge (starting from participants of past and future on-site trainings) ● Add or change sections and content to create the most correct “paths of knowledge” ● Find or develop new postnuke plugins to include new tools and features ● Understand when and how to add new initiatives Startup... once online... monitor the community to:

The General Picture

A Network of volunteers and professionals ● S&T Collaborium is jet a network of volunteers, willing to transfer knowledge and technologies to developing countries ● A bigger community needs a tool for the management, like: – Discussions about new on-site trainings – Individuate new volunteers and professional – Discussions on past and future on-site trainings – Assign different tasks to different users to manage new on-site trainings – Involve Collaborium.net users (asking for new on- site training or to participate to on-site trainings) ● Finally: Make available every useful tools to manage on-site trainings (Enrique can't call more than one person at the same time... not yet)

Business, Open Source and developing countries ● Cisbic develop Open Source sofware and with Open Source tools we create services (like hosting) ● During the management of the community we want to study the possibility to guide people to business services ● Special solution would be needed for special situations (small budgets, small bandwidth...) ● On-site business solutions could be suggested and guided by us ● We are not strong enough to really be “Business Incubator” but we can collaborate sending professionals to create specific services

Good luck!