I hear daily about open source projects, the open source business model, what it means in terms of freedom, choice, risks, investment, etc... What I rarely hear about is what is life like for those who actually contribute and dedicate a part of their life to open source?

Read more: What does it mean to be an Open Source author?

On my last trip to Tolmezzo I visited a ham factory in Sauris and made lots of pictures. One of this was choosen for the wikipedia article about Speck.

And this happens to me, who has no clue about photography

Another review of my Joomla! 1.5 book from zend.com with this conclusion

Read the full review -> Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5

With our company eduate.eu we are partner in several european projects. The focus of these projects are learning from each other, share experiences, do things together, developing special skills etc. - all in a European view.

The project I want to talk about is a G2 Learning Partnership Project and it is funded by the European Commission in the framework of Socrates. Funded by the European Commission means not that you can spend thousands of Euros in nice bars in Brussels. Funded means, that you get the flight costs (up to a limit) and a bit money for paper and printer ink in the office and so on.

Eduate.eu (Christine Graf) is the project coordinator of the Cross Cooking project.

Project description:
The project aims to rediscover and preserve traditions in cooking across Europe, whilst enhancing the possibilities of learning and cross-generational and cultural cohesion - read more.

So in these kind of projects there is no real money (in the sence of getting rich) involved and most of the people do not have IT skills. All of these projects needs a website and a communication system (even Phone, Skype, E-Mail, whatever). For most of the smaller projects it is nearly impossible to do something more than five HTML pages with the outcomes of the project. For this project we wanted to make few things different. We choosed Drupal and tried to develop the website in a way that the project participants can follow the development and still be able to use the website. That means no special design, no individual module development, etc because that would be too expensive. Another decision was to open all the content and the discussions, because we spend European tax money and the website visitors should see everything. If there were technical needs during the project, we installed a contributed module and tried to find a clever solution. The project started with Drupal 4.6 and now we have Drupal 5.7

And now?

After one and a half year and several meetings (real & virtual) the group has written a European cookbook in many languages on-line! This cookbook is a collaborative work made with the Drupal book module by people who never touched a computer before.

Because they want to share all the recipes from Wales, Germany, Italy, Finland & Hungary  they decided that the cookbook is downloadable for free (download here). It is also possible to buy it but the most important thing is to try out cooking

From my perspective this was a wonderful project and the group has reached much more for the development in Europe than they expected at the beginning!

And I am very happy about the fact, that Drupal is one big Lego Brick in this project.

At the moment the group has applied for another project with the name "doing2learn".

I am very curious!

took place in our new office in Fitou.

I don't like cross posting ... so see my "full report" here

http://groups.drupal.org/node/11776

As I promised long time ago I will talk more about our european projects.

In one project, we have a few videos and today a had ... not a real problem ... but something like a chain reaction But finally the video from the turkish tv station made it on the website!

Video codecs, aspect ratios and other buzzwords

Btw:

Have you seen Sara & Christine in Ankara?

Icecream

Where was the shop?

More pictures here