QualiPSo Competence Centres: Presentation Package

The goal of the QualiPSo Network of Competence Centres is to provide to FLOSS users, developers, and consumers, high-quality resources and expertise on the various topics related to open source software.
This will be achieved via education, training, consulting, hosting, and certification not only in terms of tools and platforms but also methodologies, studies, and best practices. QualiPSo Competence Centres are federated in a Network that will work as a mechanism for sharing success stories, failures, questions, recommendations, best practices, and any kind of information that could help the establishment of a solid international collaborative environment for supporting quality in FLOSS.
New competence centers can be admitted to the QualiPSo network after their proposals are evaluated by the QualiPSo Competence Centres Board to ensure that the prospective Competence Centre is compliant with the QualiPSo Network Agreement, sharing a common vision and ethics.

Each Competence Centre will act in its geographical region to increase the awareness of FLOSS and to better prepare the IT workforce for developing and using open source solutions, based on the results of the QualiPSo project. Competence Centres will put into practice the outcomes of the activities of the QualiPSo research project; they will make these results available both to the Free Open Source community and to the industry and will promote them at large through communication and dissemination programs.

Today, there are three Competence Centres already working such as the Spanish, the Brazilian and the German Competence Centers, whilst the Italian and the Chinese Centres will be launched in the short term in 2009.

In the documents on this page you will find all necessary informations and document to candidate for the establishment of a Qualipso Competence Centre in your area.
This package is composed of 3 parts:

1. QualiPSo Competence Centres Presentation V2.0.pdf: A presentation of the concepts of Qualipso Competence Centres
2. Qualipso- Competence Centres Guidelines V2.2.pdf: Guidelines indicating precisely how to formalise your candidature to a new Qualipso Competence Centre
3. Qualipso D8.2 Network Agreement V2.pdf: Qualipso Network Agreement: this is the formal document binding all Qualipso Competence Centres and describing rules of governance. All existing Qualipso Competence Centres have signed this agreement. Contacting them can also be helpful in the process. You will find below all addresses

For any further information or questions, do not hesitate to contact

• Spanish Competence Centre
  The QualiPSo Competence Center in Spain is a joint effort of the GSyC/LibreSoft research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC), the CETTICO research group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and Telefonica R&D. These are founding members of the MORFEO community, with which the Competence Centre will share a close link. Teófilo Romera Otero, from the GSyC/LibreSoft group states: "The creation of the Competence Centre will be an opportunity to uplift our activities to a higher and institutionalized level, allowing a better impact for the creation of knowledge and the services we have been already offering for years".
  Spanish Competence Centre Site
• Brazilian Competence Centre
  The Qualipso Competence Centre in Brazil is located at the University of São Paulo and will formally start its activities in December, 2008. According to Prof. Fabio Kon, the São Paulo Competence Centre director, "the Competence Centre will be an excellent means for the university to communicate with the Brazilian society and software industry; it will contribute not only sharing the knowledge developed by our research groups but also working as a meeting point for students, researchers, and practitioners from our region and abroad; we also expect to benefit from being part of an international collaborative network focusing on the quality of Free and Open Source Software".
  Brazilian Competence Centre Site
• German Competence Centre
  The German Competence Centre will be located at the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) in Berlin and will start its activities in the first quarter of 2009. Its main emphasis will be on providing a factory for OSS projects and on Qualipso services in the context of technical, semantic, and organizational interoperability between Open Source systems as well as between Open Source systems and Closed Source systems. Governmental organizations as well as industry and research will profit from their contributions and the Qualipso network.
  German Competence Centre.
• Next Competence Centres
  In 2009, it is planned the opening of the QualiPSo Competence Center in Rome to be instantiated by the collaboration of the Department of Innovation and Technologies of the Italian Government and Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A. The Roma Competence Center will be launched to support the wider adoption of open source technologies by the many public administrations all over Italy. Moreover this competence centre will coordinate other similar initiatives at country level. In addition to the launch of this Competence Center a new competence Center in China will be launched in the short term.