The University of the South Pacific is the host of the International Open Source Node for Pacific Island Countries (IOSN PIC). Other participants include the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), SOPAC and PICISOC.
Our contribution to software freedom day will actually be a day early, on September 14th. This is the University's open day, the one day in the year when the university opens it's doors to the public. There will be staff and students from over 50 schools in Fiji alone attending open day as well as many members of the public, local press etc. We felt this was just too good an opportunity to miss!
Our aim for software freedom day is simply to increase awareness of FOSS. We will have a small stand with around 4 PC's and hopefully a couple of OLPC XO laptops. The PC's will all be running Ubuntu and the stand will be manned by members of staff from the university's IT services, most of whom are avid FOSS advocates. They will be on hand to discuss all aspects of FOSS and demonstrate it's use. There will also be some printed brochures and we will burn CDs on request.
In addition to the booth, we are also distributing an information pack to each school that attends the open day. The pack contains an informative brochure on FOSS, a copy of the Open Education CD, a copy of Edubuntu and a number of 'primers' - introductory documentation on FOSS.
The IOSN PIC participates in a wider network of such nodes in the Asia pacific region and worldwide. the general objective of IOSN PIC is to promote the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the Pacific region, to develop research projects relating to the use and implementation of FOSS based systems, to promote its use by govenrments organisations and communities of the region and and to lift community awareness of the benefits of FOSS as compared to proprietary software.