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 four Competence Centres already working such as the Spanish, the Brazilian, the German and the Italian Competence Centers, whilst the Chinese, the Polish and the Japanes Centres will be launched in the short term in 2010.

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: A presentation of the concepts of Qualipso Competence Centres
2. QualiPSo Competence Centres Guidelines: Guidelines indicating precisely how to formalise your candidature to a new Qualipso Competence Centre
3. Qualipso Network Agreement: 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 Jean-Pierre dot Laisne at Bull dot Net

• 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.
• Italian Competence Centre
  Mainly driven by important Italian Academic players, supported by a big industrial partner and starting from the technical and scientific results produced by the QualiPSo project, the QualiPSo Italian Competence Center is a no-profit no-loss consortium working on Open Source topics and techniques, operating on a National scale and addressed particularly to meet the needs of basic software and applications for schools, universities, small municipalities, healthcare \ hospital and SMEs in the adoption of Open Source software.
  The final goal is to favor the adoption of Open Source software. To this end, the Italian Competence Center provides a set of services and a specific support to enable different stakeholders to have proper software solutions to manage their daily activities but at the same time lower the licensing costs, and also to have the ability to customize their software according to their needs regardless of the roadmaps imposed by sw providers. These stakeholders can exploit the support, the competencies and the training provided by the Competence Center to understand, customize and adapt the Open Source paradigm to their needs, thus introducing a valid alternative to the currently adopted proprietary solutions
  Italian Competence Centre
• Polish Competence Centre
  This centre has been established in 2010 in Poznań as an internal unit of a Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC). The centre aims at supporting local FLOSS development and adoption, in particular by providing services mainly to PSNC projects and development teams launched or evolving towards OSS models, local public administraton and education sector. Its main focus will be on software development best practices, FLOSS adoption in specific domains of network services, tools and services for collaborative work and communication, interoperability and trustworthiness. The centre also engages in FLOSS promotion and educational activities by supporting and co-organizing local FLOSS related events and initiatives.
  Polish Competence Centre
• Japanese Competence Centre
  QualiPSo Japan Competence Center is organized as a section under IPA(Information-Technology Promotion Agency) Open Software Center. Its mission is promotion of OSS and Open Standards. For this goal, it is providing guidebooks, guidelines, development tools, development environments, software resources, study reports, education/training materials, seminar services and evaluation services for users, industries, OSS communities, Government and educational institutions..
  Japanese Competence Centre
• Chinese Competence Centre
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  Chinese Competence Centre