Daily Archives: Wednesday, September 16, 2015

  • LibreOffice & ODF to be adopted by Italian military

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The Italian military is moving to LibreOffice and Open Document Format (ODF), according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. This will be Europe’s second largest migration to a free and open source office suite and open standards since the Italian Defence Ministry will be installing LibreOffice on 150,000 machines.

    LibreOffice

    The migration will begin in October 2015 and is expected to be completed at the end of 2016.

    The deployment of LibreOffice will be jointly managed by Libreitalia and the Italian Defence Ministry, with the former providing trainers and the Ministry devising course materials, which will later be released under a Creative Commons licence.

    An agreement between the Ministry and LibreItalia was signed on 15th September in Rome by Rear Admiral Ruggiero Di Biase, General Manager of the Italian Ministry of Defence’s Information Systems and LibreItalia president Sonia Montegiove.

    Sonia Montegiove and Rear Admiral Ruggiero Di Biase

    The Ministry of Defence is the first Italian central government organisation to migrate to open source software for office productivity. On the other hand, many regional public sector organisations have already made this move, such as the Emilia-Romagna region, the provinces of Perugia, Cremona, Macerata, Bolzano and Trento, the cities of Bologna, Piacenza and Reggio Emilia, the Galliera Hospital in Genoa and healthcare ASL 5 in Veneto, to name but a few.

    The Italian Defence Ministry project is also one of Europe’s largest migrations to date to a free and open source office suite. The largest European public sector organisation using free software office suites is currently the French Interior Ministry with some 240,000 desktops. Many French ministries use open source office suites including the Tax Agency, the Finance Ministry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Agriculture. LibreOffice is deployed on some 72,000 PCs within the French Gendarmerie, which also uses Ubuntu Linux as its operating system of choice.

    In June 2014, the autonomous regional government of Extremadura (Spain) confirmed that 10,000 PCs in its healthcare organisation are running open source office applications and that the same is planned for its own 22,000 PCs. In Germany the city of Munich runs also runs LibreOffice on over 17,000 Linux workstations.

  • Fouling FoI

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    no fouling road signOne topic which all newly elected local councillors anywhere in the country will encounter in their correspondence is dog fouling, especially as the UK’s dog population was estimated to be 9 million in 2014.

    All those dogs have to eat and dispose of the subsequent waste products estimated by Keep Britain Tidy (PDF) to weigh in at a 1,000 tonnes per day.

    Local authorities and town and parish councils have a variety of powers called Dog Control Orders to control the handling and behaviour of dogs on areas of land within their jurisdiction; these include an offence of failing to remove dog faeces.

    The maximum penalty for committing an offence under a Dog Control Order is £1,000 in a Magistrates Court. However council officers may alternatively issue a Fixed Penalty Notice, usually set at £75.

    Dear Bristol City Council,

    This is a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act.

    Kindly disclose the number of:

    a) fixed penalty notices issued
    b) prosecutions brought

    in the last 5 years for dog fouling

    1. within the entire local authority area
    2. specifically within Easton & Lawrence Hill wards

    Yours, etc.

    The answer was received earlier this week.

    You sent us a Freedom of Information request on 12/08/2015

    Your request number is CRN00017902

    Our reply to your request is:

    This response should answer your request in full.

    a) fixed penalty notices issued in the last 5 years for dog fouling

    1. within the entire local authority area – 79
    2. specifically within Easton & Lawrence Hill wards – 20

    b) prosecutions brought in the last 5 years

    1. within the entire local authority area – 32
    2. specifically within Easton & Lawrence Hill wards – 4

    One striking thing is just how low the overall figures for both fixed penalty notices and prosecutions are for a city of some 430,000 inhabitants, but then again the city council has a very small number of enforcement officers (posts passim) who also have to deal with fly-posting, fly-tipping, litter and other environmental crimes besides dog fouling.

    As can also be seen from the statistics, the city’s Easton and Lawrence Hill wards – the areas in which Tidy BS5 campaigners are active – account for about one quarter of fixed penalty notices issued for dog fouling throughout the entire city. Given the city council’s low levels of enforcement in other Easton and Lawrence Hill for enforcement officers’ other areas of responsibility, this figure is quite astounding. This figure could have been influenced by the dog fouling campaign carried out in both wards 2 years ago by Up Our Street.

    Dog fouling in Bristol can be reported online to the city council.

    In addition, for elsewhere in the UK, the Gov.uk website has a handy dog fouling reporting page.