2009, Year of Free Education

The year 2009 will be remembered for the worldwide economic and financial crisis, which affected and is affecting Italy, too.

Redomino will remember 2009 as the year of records as far as free software education is concerned.

In the very first quarter of this year we provided training for hundreds of hours, branched in personalized training courses, on-the-job training, distance learning, etc. We doubled the amount of training hours compared to the first quarter of 2008; expectations and booking follow the same trend, not to mention all the time spent on writing documentation about developments, manuals, FAQs, how-tos and free documentation on ReLabs, our laboratory-website. This is training, too!

Moreover Redomino organizes events in order to make the Open Source more popular; this kind of activities aids in increasing the attention regarding the idea of education. The Redomino Plone Tour, for instance, is a touring workshop having place in the main Northern Italian cities which aims at spreading the knowledge about Plone and showing its versatility in developing websites, intranets, etc... The RPT's popularity keeps on increasing every year, with demonstrations of interest and enthusiasm from companies, bodies, media and sponsors supporting the project, hosting events, popularizing the message.

In such a hard time for investments, we were wondering:

Why the asking for training is actually increasing?

Well, the answer is quite easy.

Redomino provides training courses focused on the most well-known and used softwares, which are released under free license; Redomino's main targets are companies, organizations and Public Administrations, but, thanks to these softwares' flexibility, they represent a great solution for private citizens as well.

The nature and variety of our courses concerning programming languages, operating systems and applications make our courses perceived as an investment, not an expense.

Earlier, CIOs (Chief Information Officers) used to make their fellow workers and new hires attend training courses on applications already in use within the company or about to be bought. Now the trend seems to have changed: the staff of the company is now trained on open source softwares and technologies, thus they will be able to realize and manage applications that will be used within the company; in this way they will have a central role and will contribute to the development of the released codes.

Of course, companies do not aim at averting their providers, but the market obliges the all of us at spending better, and our courses provide an operating training that leaves something very important to the attendants: a free know-how that makes them able to use these technologies immediately (this is one of Open Source's best qualities), and a cultural awareness that, if cultivated properly, will never fade, but actually improve.

Learning to develop (when it is possible), use, manage and maintain a proprietary software is a limit and a danger, especially in a time like this, when IT companies are in trouble and obliged to decrease the set of products to sell and to provide assistance to, when in many cases they are obliged to make their worker redundant or to put out of business.

Investing on open source software means to make your company acquire a deep application's know-how that will make your company avoid the lock-in effect.

Moreover, once the crisis is gone the softwares will change, but your know-how will stay.
2009, the year of Open Source and Free Education.

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