Public Funds in the UK: Open Source for Document and Content Management? - London 07/01/2010

Is Open Source a viable way for the public sector to contain its IT costs? Government policy is gradually becoming more favourable to open source. Many commentators identify open source as a way to contain spiralling project costs. Yet much of this discussion is driven by underlying agendas: it contains as much disinformation as realistic appraisal of the capabilities of open source software.

The BCS Open Source Specialist Group is organising an event to look at the reality behind the rhetoric. Responding to the challenge in the above Guardian article, we aim to bring together a group of information management practitioners and vendors to discuss their experience of web and document management in the public sector. The event will consist of a series of talks, panel sessions and open discussion of the challenges of web and document management in the public sector, and the ways in which open source software might be suitable for addressing these challenges.

Netsight Technical Director, Matt Hamilton will be speaking at the event and presenting a series of mini case-studies on public sector organisations successfully using the Plone content management system to provide services with much more transparent costs.

Full details of the event including location and registration details can be found at the BCS website.