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Open Source Software for Peace Corps Volunteer?

Posted by Cliff on from the lending-a-helping-hand dept.

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."

5 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. Government Forge by cuzality · · Score: 3, Informative

    Your friend may want to check out GovernmentForge.org, a website "dedicated to providing free and open source software to state and local governments."

  2. Geek Corph by xanderwilson · · Score: 4, Informative

    Maybe get in touch with Geek Corps. They've got a parallel mission and maybe they've delt with this sort of thing.

    Alex.

  3. Real projects by dubStylee · · Score: 2, Informative

    One thing that is good with students is assigning real projects - have them pick a local community based NGO and build something for them - a CMS, or Blog (check sourceforge for software projects). The SQLClinic project is a management/tracking system for small psychiatric clinics but it or something like it could be useful to many small agencies and would serve as a model of what needs to be done at a larger level for larger agencies.

  4. A few suggestions by Anonymous Coward · · 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 answer too.

    /* security, */

    See above for auditing. You'll be more interested in getting HOWTOs for this one, since the software is already in place.

  5. open source accounting software by benjyfrank · · Score: 2, Informative

    Sql-ledger, for basic accounting, 100% free.

    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 than oracle, but that hasn't happened yet.

    http://www.compiere.org

    Hope this helps!

    --
    Karani -- Gebrauchte Notebooks am Checkpoint Charlie.