About 70,000 students and their 7,000 teachers in the Geneva school district will gradually be moving to Open Source.

The decision to move to Open Source was taken by the Geneva Public School District (Département de l’Instruction Publique Genevois (DIP) in March 2006, says Manuel Grandjean, project leader for the Geneva district’s Open Source migration. “The district wants Open Source software to become the default.”

Very cool - this is what I love to see. Learn more here.

While this article is about schools and not libraries - I think the two organizations have a lot of similarities. The article titled: School districts serve up lessons in Linux by Andrew Hendry appeared on the Computerworld site in January:

School districts in the US and Canada find Linux and open source offers better support, cheaper setup costs, and improved educational value

I think this is great! Not only does open source save these schools money, but it also teaches kids about open source!

This from the SchoolForge discussion list:

On Saturday March 1st, Untangle and the ACCRC are organizing a massive installfest for Bay Area schools. We are refurbishing hundreds of older/discarded computers with Ubuntu and donating them to Bay Area schools. We need your help from Linux users installing Ubuntu at the 4 locations, which are San Francisco, Berkeley, San Mateo & Marin County.

Signup sheets for each location are here:

http://wiki.untangle.com/index.php/Installfest

What a great idea! I’d love to see more events like this on the east coast - or anywhere else in the world for that matter. If you’re in the area and have the skills this would be a great way to help spread knowledge of open source to future professionals.

Learn more from Untangle.