Association to Promote Open Source in Government

The president of Jordan Open Source Association, Issa Mahasneh, said that the association will work in order to promote Open Source software in ministries and government institutions.

The association is also trying to increase community awareness about Open Source, said Mahasneh in a short interview within the "Innovation in Mobile Data Collection" workshop held in Amman by MobileActive and UNICEF.

Following is the English translation of the interview as well as the video (in Arabic):

Jordan Open Source Association is a community movement that aims to spread both Open Source and Open Content philosophies in Jordan. We are holding a set of activities in order to accomplish our mission, lately we have organized several meetings with experts from inside and outside Jordan, like Mitchell Baker, chairperson of Mozilla Foundation and Joi Ito, board member of the Open Source Initiative, the biggest association that cares about Open Source in the world.

We are organizing several training courses in Jordanian universities in order to provide the needed training to students in Open Source technologies like PHP, Linux and Java. The idea behind Open Source is still not well-known in Jordan and the Arab World, so we are trying to make people aware about Open Source features and how can they themselves benefit from them.

We are also showing how the entire world is becoming more "open", we have relevant examples like the adoption of Linux operating system in several public organizations and NGOs as well as other FOSS that can be used by the community.

The association is also encouraging software developers in Jordan to give more attention to Open Source and to offer their applications within this field, a suggested example is the release of graduation projects in our universities under an Open Source license by students, so everybody can gain benefit of their work. On the ground, university students and developers like this idea.

We are not only working on the IT sector, we have also started to operate in the cultural field. I personally work within the Creative Commons Jordan project in the promotion and translation. The idea behind Creative Commons is that artists, writers and bloggers can have their work with "some rights reserved" rather to be fully copyrighted or with "all the rights reserved". They can retain a part of the rights, like attribution, but at the same time they can additional conditions like non-commercial, etc... In this way all the people can use their work. We are encouraging the release of creative works in Jordan under Creative Commons and Free Culture licenses.

Basically, both Free Culture and Free Software are two new ideas in Jordan, but we see there is a relevant acceptance from the community, that is why we will start to convince public administration and the government, i.e. ministries and other governmental organizations, to use Open Source.

Q: What do you need in order to progress even more?

A: Sincerely our main problem is that financial aid has not been given to the association yet, but we are working on this. The second thing is that our ideas are not fully "accepted" till now, but several local organization, like universities, are helping us.