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The city of Schoten has always been an early adopter where free software is concerned. It plays this part very well. Not only does the city integrate free software in its IT environment whereever possible (e.g. Asterisk for IP telephony, Zarafa for the E-mail server): it also gives back to the FLOSS community and thus sets the example of how to be a perfect free software user.

With the hands-on labs the city does even more than just giving back: it is building its very own community of IT-professionals from cities, schools, companies in the social economy and volunteer organizations.

The Royal Atheneum of Schoten, a local highschool, will be hosting the next edition of the hands-on labs on November 13th, organized by the city of Schoten. The access to these hands-on labs is free for whoever is interested. The labs offer insights in a wealth of free software packages that are needed in every organization, ranging from mail-, file- and print serving to web, proxy, firewalling, gis and document generation systems.
The school and its pupils benefit largely from this symbiosis, as the
students have the opportunity to be in direct contact with multiple small and medium enterprises where open source software is used.
The programm offers 4 1-hour sessions preceeded by opening talks in the morning and afternoon. This edition there will be approximately twelve simultaneous sessions, making a total of nearly 50 presentations. There will also be two GovCamp tracks.

The hands-on labs website hosts information files about each software package being presented during the labs. These files give an overview of the software category, description and usage of a package, the official website, supported operating systems, wikipedia, LinkedIn, Facebook and Youtube resources, references, and approximate savings.

As the city migrated to OpenOffice.org during the summer, this application is a star feature of this hands-on labs edition: there are 4 sessions available, so that whatever your other interests are, you can always join one of these and learn about the city's approach towards replacing such an important piece of software. Here, too, the city did its utmost best to share its experiences: the IT department made available a series of over 50 movies documenting and explaining the usage of OpenOffice.org features.

More information:

• Hands-on labs
  (Dutch, other languages will be available in the future)
• OpenOffice.org movies