Open Source Software for Peace Corps Volunteer?

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."

Comments

Seems to me

[Otter]

First, keep in mind that you're there to help the Philippines and Filipino people, not to advance free software, right? It's not clear to me how making kids "experts" in software no one there uses in order to turn them into lobbyists does them much good.

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.