| Europe, as a whole, has a stake in improving the usage of F/OSS in all branches of IT and public life, in general. Although there is a strong Open Source Community in IT-strong countries of Europe, there is lot more to be done. F/OSS communities throughout Europe can achieve better results through co-ordination of their research activities/programmes that reflect the current state-of-the-art.The main objective of the TOSSAD project is to start integrating and exploiting already formed methodologies, strategies, skills and technologies in F/OSS domain in order to help governmental bodies, educational institutions and SMEs to share research results, establish synergies, build partnerships and innovate in an enlarged Europe.More precisely, the TOSSAD project aims at improving the results of the F/OSS communities throughout Europe through supporting the coordination and networking of these communities by means of state-of-the-art studies, usability cases, curriculum development and the development of collaborative information e-bays and web-based groupware. By conducting these actions on an international European level, with inclusion of the ACC and NMS countries, the TOSSAD project will create sufficient momentum for a general acceptance and coordinated boost of F/OSS development.Our project proposal is in line with the EU policies that encourage wider usage of F/OSS in Europe on every platform. It also supports the objectives of the IST Work Programme 2003-2004, in particular, as stated clearly in Part 2.2.2: "The development of open standards and open source software will be encouraged when appropriate to ensure interoperability of solutions and to further innovation." |