A colleague of mine is having some difficulties getting an Open Source solution to be made available within his government organization. In providing support to him, I've collected the below resources. Of particular interest is the 2007 Government Open Source Policies from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, listing the Open Source policies of hundreds of national, state/province/territory and local governments (including Canada's).

SciencePipes is an environment in which students, educators, citizens, resource managers, and scientists can create and share analyses and visualizations of biodiversity data. It is built to support inquiry-based learning, allowing analysis results and visualizations to be dynamically incorporated into web sites (e.g. blogs) for dissemination and consumption beyond SciencePipes.org itself. For more information: * further introduction * presentations * status of the site * NSDL article about SciencePipes.org Alpha functionality demos: * uploading and running a Kepler workflow * editing a pipe in the SciencePipes.org authoring environment SciencePipes is a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Information Science Program and is funded by the National Science Digital Library.

In this hands-on learning programme a team from Murdoch Library helps you explore free online tools that can be used for teaching, learning, research and managing daily work. It runs from 23 June to 28 July 2009. Each Friday information about two or three Things , plus exercises about each will appear on this blog. You can complete all of this from home, or if you booked in you can attend workshops offered by the library.