VAMK Press Release 3
09.10.2009

Expert seminar about Web telephony and Web Meeting Tools

October 6^th, 2009, an Open Source seminar was held about the VOIP (Voice over IP) and web meeting tools, in which development the Open Kvarken project at VAMK is involved in.

Speakers from three international Open Source Communities were invited.

1. The FFmpeg Community, Robert Swain from England, spoke about IPTV and HD resolution for Ekiga.
2. The OpenMeetings Community's main developer, Sebastian Wagner from Germany, presented his web meeting solution and the whole seminar was streamed live over the Internet with it.
3. The Kamailio Community, Daniel Mierla from Romania, spoke about Kamailio.

These three Community representatives had negotiations with local ICT companies in the morning and on the following day.

The Open Kvarken project has together with JNT made a joint procurement for a tunneling feature and a web applet for voice over IP from Sesca ISW. Both solutions have been released under the open license GPL, as that was one of the main requirements for the procurement.

The IT manager from JNT, Kenneth Nylund, presented the VOIP end result and promised to make it available to all 1200 companies registered at Kvarken.com. He also mentioned that they find OpenMeetings interesting, and that they will start selling it to their customers as soon as version 1.0 is released.

The Open Kvarken project will employ Robert Swain half-time, to make HD resolution in FFmpeg. The result of this will be ”Telepresence” made possible on standard computers with an HD camera. A similar seminar about tunneling and Telepresence for Ekiga will be held in a year in Vaasa.

The whole seminar was streamed over the Internet with OpenMeetings and TriCaster, which students at VAMK worked with. A dozen persons followed the seminar online.

All presentations are available for download at www.openkvarken.fi

A statement about the OpenMeetings seminar streaming from Roger Anderson, IT support at Korsholm municipality:

”Yes it was okay. Both picture and sound was good. It froze two times, but only for a short period of time (about 1 min). One good thing was that you also saw the text to the right, in that way you could look at the presentation as if you were ”physically” present and saw it through the video projector in the room. One more microphone might have been needed, as you often couldn't hear the questions asked by the audience.”

Roger A.

Press Release 2
VAMK 31.08.2009

Successful online seminar with Dataföreningen in Umeå.

On monday 08-31-2009, the Open Kvarken project in cooperation with Dataföreningen in Umeå had a successful online seminar about Open Source, licenses, business models and jurisprudence. The tool used for the online broadcast was OpenMeetings 0.9, which the Open Kvarken project has translated into swedish and finnish, and whose development it has been involved in together with the community. We all came to the conclusion that OpenMeetings soon will be able to replace costly commercial solutions that dominate the market at the moment. The main developer from the OpenMeetings community, Sebastian Wagner from Germany, is one of the speakers on our coming seminar, which is to be held in VAMK on 10-06-2009. On the same seminar Sesca together with JNT (Jakobstads Network & Telecom) will also present the web applet that the Open Kvarken project has financed together with JNT. This VOIP solution will be offered to 1200 businesses through the BAIT project website. The Open Kvarken project has financed a tunneling function from Sesca that will be handed over to the Kamailio community. This
community's representative, Daniel Mierla, is also on the list of speakers on the coming seminar. For more information about the seminar, check the project's website: www.openkvarken.fi and www.vcoss.fi

Further information:
Rainer lytz (rainer.lytz(@)puv.fi, tel. 040-8412805)

Press Release 1
VAMK 24.9.2008

Substantial funding has been obtained to create Open Source Resource Centers in Vaasa and Umeå.

VAMK, University of Applied Sciences in Vaasa and Umeå University have received fundning for a common Open Kvarken project. Half of the funding comes from the Botnia-Atlantica Interreg program which supports cross-border cooperation between Finland, Sweden and Norway. The other funders are The Regional Council of Ostrobothnia, Västerbotten County, the Vaasa Region Development Company and the city of Vaasa. VAMK will be the coordinator for the project and also a cofunder.

Open Source software code is software that anyone can use, explore, develop and redistribute. The traditional programs used today have mostly closed source code and are, thus, proprietary software. Today, the Internet would not work without Open Source software. This openness is spreading and Open Source software has a great development potential since the development costs are spread across the globe.

The main objective of Open Kvarken is to bring Open Source solution alternatives to the public sector. The private sector will also be encouraged to sell support for Open Source solutions in the public sector. The interest in sharing software between different authorities is growing. If the public sector itself owns its source code this can provide significant savings. This way the public sector only needs to buy services to adapt the source code to its specific needs. Here the Open Kvarken project can offer information and change of attitudes in our own regions.

During this three-year project, an Open Source Resource Center in Vaasa (VCOSS) and one in Umeå (UCOSS) will be established. They will collaborate on various components of the project. Fifteen browser-based solutions for the public sector should be presented such as PDF signing, CRM.

An open source alternative for web meetings is to be developed. A "startkit" for SME.s will be introduced. Teaching Materials on Open Source will also be developed and tested in VAMK and Umeå University.

Startup seminars will be held in Umeå and Vaasa on Ocotober 2 and 15.


Further information:

Project Manager Rainer Lytz,
Tel. +358 40 841 2805, rainer.lytz (@) puv.fi

Project Coordinator Henrik Niemelä
Tel. +358 40 011 3896, henrik.niemela (@) puv.fi