Good OpenOffice.org practices in

UNDP FOSS project (www.foss.bg) has been started in Bulgaria, under auspcies of Internet Society Bulgaria (www.isoc.bg) with an objective to strengthen people’s participation in local governance and generate savings in local budgets. Another aim within the project is establish a Regional FOSS Resource Centre.

The pilot municipality in the project was Kardjali (www.kardjali.bg and kardjali.foss.bg). Kardjali is one of the 28 regional cities in Bulgaria. Located in the south of the country, and close to the border with Turkey and Greece, it has around 69,000 citizens, a mixture of Bulgarian and ethnic Turks. In the first two stages of the migration, the local government authority’s computers switched from Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer to OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox.

Now the project has been extended to Turkish municipalities.

Some brief statistics:
Total number of computers with OpenOffice.org working instead of MS Office: 200
Total number of employees trained on OpenOffice.org, Mozilla and Linux : 200
Percentage of staff satisfied with the trainings: 75
Percentage of staff saying that there is significant difference between MSO and OOo: 5

[With thanks to Görkem Çetin for the news]