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Dear Debian users of Bombay,
we are an Italian software company that is attending an international trade show in Mumbai www.wsfindia.org, we will be distributing 3,000 CDs of our Debian-based Desktop Environment, as well as demo our debian based server application (more details are in the attachments).
We are also hosting a workshop where we expect the attendance of Richard Stallman.
We would like to get into contact with local Debian developers, as well as Java and Python, that might want to:
-Be hired to promote and distribute our Debian-based LiveCDs at the conference, at our large stand.
OR
-Help us with Debian sys admin with our operational and demo laptops.
OR
-Discuss eventual long term collaborations with ParTecs SRL, as individuals (from Mumbai or in Italy) or as members of local development companies.
Please, contact me via email with 2 sentences describing your interest, and attaching a CV and/or some info about you.
Looking forward to meeting you,
Rufo Guerreschi
______________________________________
Rufo Guerreschi, CEO
ParTecs - Participatory Technologies
web: www.ParTecs.com
email: rg@partecs.com
tel: +39 06 53273090
fax: +39 06 53273874
cell: +39 335 7545620
(Temporary cell and SMS phone in
India from 1/3 to 1/25/04: +91 9821453817)
ParTecs BROCHURE
**** DRAFTS ****
PARTECS - Participatory Technologies
Integrated 2-way Remote Communications
--ABOUT US--
ParTecs(tm) SRL offers 2-way communication services that enable members and representatives of organizations and networks to complement their in-person meetings with effective participation in formal and informal decision-making processes via Internet, Email, Mail-in and Fax-in forms.
ParTecs SRL is a private company headquartered in Rome, with key staff in Bonn, Turin and Seattle. We offer software-related services to political an social organizations, national and transnational, governmental and non-governmental. Through efficient and participatory multimedia groupware software, we promote our clients efforts to energize their constituency and best fullfill their mission through increased membership numbers, activism and financial contributions.
PARTECS 1.0, our software-based 2-way communication platform, has mainly been designed for the mission-critical communication needs of large networks and confederations of political parties, trade unions, civil society organizations, religious groups, human rights organizations, grassroots social movements, as well as individual organizations.
Further, through its representativity profiling and structured text co-authoring modules, we enable inter-organizational, federations and networks constituent processes. ParTecs supports fast and cost-efficient inter-language decision-making, through our intergated selective manual/automated translation workflow engine.
These tools are primarily meant used to complement regular in-person gatherings throughout the year, with the ability to best prepare and follow up to such meetings. Nonethless, they may also be used as the main or sole communication space for some organzations or networks.
All the software solutions we offer are developed by extending, integrating and customizing a number of existing free/open-source software (FOSS) applications, and are all under free/open-source software licensing, as defined by both FSF and OSI, and mostly under GNU GPL license. All our servers and desktops, including administration, run FOSS software, and sepcifically Debian-Nonprofit operating systems and applications.
---PRODUCTS & SERVICES---
*****PARTECS 1.0: A 2-WAY COMMUNICATION PLATFORM*****
-WHAT IS PARTECS 1.0?
ParTecs 1.0 is a software-based 2-way communication platform that enable members and representatives of organizations and networks to complement their in-person meetings with effective participation in formal and informal decision-making processes via Internet, Email, Mail-in and Fax-in forms.
Through these 2-way communication technlogies, members and representatives can fully engage in democratic deliberative discourse, information sharing, committee discussions, petition proposal, emendments processing, choice of representatives and secure deliberation.
Further, it enables members of organizations and networks to freely gather in internal groups, self-organize, inform each other, communicate and crystallize their collective beliefs and action plans in a most effective and participatory manner.
Among the technologies we use: Debian-NonProfit Operating System, Zope, Zope modules, Python, Java, Vivarto NCP, LDAP, PostGresSQL, Apache, Tomcat and Jboss.
-WHY DO YOU NEED PARTECS 1.0?
Traditionally, the driving and energizing forces of successfull member-based political organizations have been active participation, great ideas and great leaders.
Such active participation was achieved through a number of in-person communciation processes: assemblies, congresses, street events, leaflets handing, committes and informal socializing activities. In the best cases, great ideas and great leaders emerged naturally from these activites, and especially through intensive, open and (somewhat)democratic confrontations in congresses and committees.
During the last decades, however, as organizations and networks goals and constituencies have become transnational and multi-language, the travel cost, translation costs and travel time have increased hugely the costs of enabling those traditional processes. Such costs have caused a large decrease in the intensity, efficiency and/or democraticness of such communications.
More recently, some organizations have successfully used websites to publicize their goals and initiatives, and used emails broadcast news to their members, to find international allies and exchange information. More recently some organizations have enabled chaotic discussions through "discussion forums" and mailing lists, though often creating major overflows in email boxes.
**PARTECS 1.0 Custom Services
ParTecs SRL offers customization, hosting, deployment, data migration, training, module extensions related to our PARTECS 1.0 server-based software platform. PARTECS 1.0 has been developed as a highly scalable and highly extensible software platform based on a carefull selection of the tens of thousands of free/open-source applications available today. We also offer integration with your legacy intranets or communication systems, as wwll as with other free/open-source groupware and discussion technologies, such as Mailman, Sympa and more.
**PARTECS 1.0 Subscription Services**
We offer monthly and annual Subscription Plans to our PARTECS Hosted Services (PTHS) to small and medium organizations. PTHS is a standard internally-managed solution based on PARTECS 1.0 technologies, that provides a complete integrated solution for basic organizational communications through Internet, Email, Mail and Fax.
**ORGANIZATIONAL CONSULTING**
In addition, we offer organizational consulting to help you best integrate and complement "In-person" with new "Remote" decision-making processes. We help organizations and networks create the best synergy between these parallel processes, so that each fully complements and enhances the other, while fitting their organizational principles. In fact, our management holds a broad range of expertise in voting methods, negotiation, decision theory and organizational theory through a unique mix of top-level academic training and on-the-field expertise in transnational political movements.
***GNU/LINUX DESKTOP MIGRATION CONSULTING:
Debian-Nonprofit Desktop Solutions
In addition to its server-based software services, ParTecs offers hi-level planning and consulting services in regards to a smooth, secure and cost-efficient migration from Windows to free/open-source (FOSS) integrated desktop solutions, which are specifically tailored for the needs of non-profit social and political organizations.
GNU/Linux has taken over the non-profit market for servers,
now GNU/Linux Debian-NP is ready for your Desktop PCs!!!
Some advantages of migrating to ParTecs Debian-NonProfit:
-Save money hugely in Windows and other application licences and upgrades, as well as hardware and technical support.
-Get access to over 14,000 free application through free CDs or over the internet with automatic install.
-Say bye to security breaches, lost files and time wasted because of viruses.
-Gain the freedom to control the future functionality and security of your desktop environments.
-Free/open-source software is not only free of charge but also allows you to modify, extend and distribute the software.
-A portion of the saved money enables you to hire the responsive and professional IT support that you always wanted but could never afford.
Partecs has unique expertises in regards to GNU/Linux operating systems, as well as Free/Open-source Integrated Desktop Environments that are configured, packaged, extended and customized to meet the specific needs of the non-profit sector. In particular, Partecs top technical staff has large expertise in and currently leads the largest such project in the world: the Debian-Nonprofit Integrated Desktop Environment.
*****PARTECS 1.0 FUNCTIONALITY OVERVIEW*****
Through our innovative participatory groupware software authorized members and representatives of organziations can:
1. Submit any information, such as news items or reports, or proposal, such as a petition, motion, emendment, commission proposal, decision-making rule of procedure, event, budget item, and more..
2. Participate efficiently in the collective rating, classification, commenting of such submissions to support the co-management of decision-making processes and collective knowledge bases.
PARTECS 1.0 has been developed in a modular and scalable fashion to enable great functional extensibilityand simplify integration with other systems and data sources. It is available as a basic standard subscription service hosted by ParTecs SRL, as well as a more powerfull platform to be customized, deployed, and integrated for specific clients.
PARTICIPATORY KNOWLEDGE BASE
Enables the open posting, and the participatory rating, classification and viewing of all kinds of information that areis deemed relevant to the organizational discussion and deliberation. Securely authenticated and profiled users can:
- Submit relevant original or third party information of many kind and formats, include required and optional descriptors, including source and licensing.
- Participate in information rating for relevance and approval.
- Participate in information classification.
- Easily initiate and maintain editorial pages of dynamic and static content.
- Participate in the rating and classification of such editorial pages.
DELIBERATIVE DISCOURSE AREAS (DDAs)
DDAs are comprised of a set of asynchronous collaborative information rating, classification and co-authoring tools. Such tools enable the participatory and effecient definition of collective decisions on any issue, internal and external.
Users are able to submit any decision item, based on a number of configurable templates. Such templates include: Users are able to submit any information and propose any decision item, based on a number of configurable templates.
Example of decision items that are supported: mission statements; press releases; date & place for a collective event; advocacy statements; political strategies; action plans; statute changes, internal rules and policies; definition of goals and rules of procedure of a DDA; drafting of any text document, structured and unstructured; elect one of more persons to a post.
To support the participation of large number of users in Deliberative Discourse Areas, the discussion space is divided in COMMISSION DDA (CDDAs) and ASSEMBLY DDA (ADDA).
In order to prioritize the focus, attention and limited time of the generaly assembly of members/representatives (ADDA), only those decision items that have been considered relevant by a number of members/representatives will be discussed in the ADDA.
The system supports issue-based fixed Elected Commissions, as in many national parliaments; as well as Open Commissions, where any member/representative can invite any other member/representative to come and decide together on a common proposal to the ADDA.
All or Authorized users are able to:
-Propose a new commission with a given objective, moderation rules, facilitation rules, voting % threshold, admission rules, time-limit, and more.
-Determine, for all finalized CDDAs, the endorsment threshold of admission to the ADDA and their prioritization rules.
Different preferential and majority voting methods are supported, and many others can be easily added.
[4] REPRESENTATIVITY PROFILING
Organizations will be allowed to be represented by their elected officials, but the votes of representatives will be weighted based on the internal accountability and participatoriness of each organizations. Here's how:
- Organizations will be required submit a set of information and documents with regards to their internal decision-making process.
- Orgs will be required to submit official and unofficial organizational documentation relating to decision making processes, funding, level of participation by members, a list of 100 or 30% of their members whichever is less (with minimal contact information). They will be required to undersign the validity of such documents.- Orgs will perform a representativity self-assessment on an online or offline questionnaire.
- An authenticity and accuracy assessment of submitted documents will be performed as much as possible. For example, random members of the org will be called to ascertain validity of submitted documentation.
- The weighting process will be automatically driven by a set of pre-defined parameters collectively defined and changed by all individual members.
- Initial parameters will be defined in combination with Charter 99 through a worldwide and statistically varied consultation.
[5] GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
- User-configurable internal messaging address........
-Support for Asian manguage on the interface and for translation
- Asynchronous support for major-languages translation of highly rated items. Translations will be manually performed by dispersed users, volunteers and paid professionals.
- Selective groups of users will have different read/write access rights as defined by the organization administrator, to reflect the organization rules and statutes.
- Temporary, Revocable and Issue-limited Representatives. Individuals and organizations can choose to temporarily lend/revoke their voting rights on specific decision areas to other individuals or organizations, while maintaining ultimate sovereignty through the ability to overwrite their vote whenever they choose to.
- Secure user authentication.
- Secure transaction.
- Security from authority collusion through distributed certification authority, database mirroring, full transparency.- Privacy of users' profile and logs.
*****PARTECS & Free/Open-Source Software(FOSS)*****
All software offered by ParTecs SRL is developed through far-reaching extention, integration and customization of existing free/open-source software; it is all are under free/open-source software licensing, as defined by both FSF and OSI, and mostly under GNU GPL license. All our servers and desktops, including administration run FOSS operating systems and software, specifically Debian-Nonprofit. We further are committed to never apply for patenting of any of the decision-making technologies that we develop.
Further, we actively promote and advocate the adoption of FOSS communication and decision-making software by political organizations, social movements and networks. Partecs staff has launched and co-hosted a large Conference in Rome in March 2003, attended by 700 people and dozens of journalists. To that goal, we have brought Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, initial developer of the GNU/Linux operating system and "inventor" of the GNU General Public License, which currently applies to 70% of the free and open-source software currently available.
Beyond important financial reasons, we regard the use of proprietary licenses and patenting of software developed for the decision-making processes of governmental and non-governmental organizations as incompatible in the medium term with any principle of democracy.
In fact, decision-making software such as Partecs-2.0 encodes in software all those decision-making rules, such as committee rules of procedures, member participation, petition submission requirements, which are at the heart of the evolution of a democratic organization.
The use of proprietary software would give an external private company extensive influence and outright veto power over any changes to such software-supported decision-making processes. In such case:
-Source code cannot be fully assessed in regards to its actual security and privacy features, which are essential in running a democratic organization.
-The license holder has the power to prevent the user organization from adapting accessing the source code and adapting the software to newly deliberated decision-making rules.
-When a newly-deliberated decision-making rule requires adapting the decision-making software to it, the license holder has the legal power and often the interest to do one or more of the following:
--Prevent the user from accessing the source code and/or develop the needed changes and upgrades.
--Ask of exorbitant prices to perform such changes to the code.
--practically veto such changes.
Further, proprietary software companies often apply for and hold patents regarding ideas that are at the base of the software they license. That is even more dangerous because it may lock a political organization in decision-making software functionalities that no other company can develop.
*****HISTORY & MANAGEMENT*****
ParTecs SRL was established in March 2003 by bringing together unique technical, administrative and academic expertises. Our staff has high-level technical and commercial management expertise in software development, top-level graduate-level political and computer science education, long-time activism in global democratization and free/open-sorce software networks.
Rufo Guerreschi,
Founder and CEO
Ovr the last 4 years, he has covered top-management technical and commercial positions at advanced server-side software providers, Urban Data Solutions in New York, and 4thPass in Seattle. While there, he has managed web-application projects involving over 20 programmers, and then lead the sale and technical deployment of multi-million dollars web-based software solutions for Global Mobile Telecom operators. He has completed his graduate education on public and international affairs at Princeton and Rutgers Universities. He has been an activist in various movements for the promotion of in-depth global democratization, and recently founded Sammondano.org.
Benjamin "Mako" Hill,
Chief Technology Officer
Benjamin "Mako" Hill is a Delegate of the Debian Project Leader and the founder and coordinator of a new Debian Sub-distribution targeted especially for the needs of the non-profit sector, called Debian-NP (as in Non Profit). (http://nonprofit.debian.net). He is also a board member of Software in the Public Interest, the non-profit legal representative of the Debian Developer Community. Debian is, by most accounts, the largest active free software development project in the world.
Giuseppe Sacco,
Chief Operations Officer.
Sacco has a Degree in Computer Science from University of Pisa, computer Science Department. He has 4 year of experience as project leader and system architect for the development of high-end web-based systems. He also has large experience with the design, implementation and administration of mission-critical large-scale database management systems. He has been actively contributing to the Debian free OS project for many years.
Rasmus Tenbergen,
Chief Marketing Officer
Dr. Tenbergen is the Founder and Executive Director of The Global Democracy Experiment, the first global e-democracy experiment. Dr. Tenbergen holds a master's degree in public administration from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, specializing in Decision Theory. He further holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Free University of Berlin and the Aachen Institute of Technology. In the 90s, he has worked for former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl as co-opted member of the national board of the governing Christian democrat party. Dr. Tenbergen does research on decision theory, technology-supported deliberation, negotiations and global governance.
FLYER
About Us
ParTecs - Participatory Technologies SRL offers software-based 2-way communication services that enable members and representatives of organizations and networks to complement their in-person meetings with effective participation in formal and informal decision-making processes via Internet, Email, Mail-in and Fax-in forms.
PARTECS 2-WAY COMMUNICATION PLATFORM
Our PARTECS 1.0 server-based software platform enables members of organizations and networks to communicate, inform each other, freely gather in groups, auto-organize and crystallize their collective beliefs and action plans in a most effective and participatory way, through Internet, Email, Mail and Fax.
It solves the democratic and efficiency deficits caused by the inadequate use, by organizations, of remote communication technologies to make collective decisions and prioritize news and information.
It fills such gap through a software-based infrastructure that enables multi-media, participatory, highly configyrable and extensible, efficient and multi-language Deliberative Discourse Processes and Participatory Information Sharing.
It is not just meant for remote voting, nor for remote discussions forums; it delivers both and, most important, what's missing in the middle.
PARTECS 1.0 is free/open-source software (FOSS), developed through the integration of a number of carefully selected FOSS applications from the thousands available today. Among the technologies we use: Debian-NonProfit Operating System, Zope, Zope modules, Python, Java, Vivarto NCP, LDAP, PostGresSQL, XML, XSLT, Apache, Tomcat and Jboss.
PARTECS 1.0 Custom Services
Starting January 2004, ParTecs SRL offers customization, hosting, deployment, module extensions, training and data migration related to our PARTECS 1.0 server-based software platform. Further, we also can provide integration with your legacy intranets and IT systems, as well as with other free/open-source groupware and discussion technologies, such as Mailman, Intranets, Sympa and more.
PARTECS 1.0 Subscription Services
Starting March 2004, ParTecs SRL offers monthly and annual Subscription Plans to our PARTECS Subscription Service (PTSS) to small and medium organizations. PTSS is a standard, completely outsourced and integrated subscriprion service, based on PARTECS 1.0 technologies, that provides a complete remote communications solution for organizational decision-making through Internet, Email, Mail and Fax.
ORGANIZATIONAL CONSULTING
In addition, we offer organizational consulting to help you best integrate and complement "In-person" with new "Remote" decision-making processes. We help organizations and networks create the best synergy between these parallel processes, so that each fully complements and enhances the other, while fitting their organizational principles. In fact, our management holds a broad range of expertise in voting methods, negotiation, decision theory and organizational theory through a unique mix of top-level academic training and on-the-field expertise in transnational political movements.
GNU/LINUX DESKTOP MIGRATION CONSULTING:
ParTecs NonProfit Desktop Environment (NPDE) 0.1r2
In addition to its FOSS server-based software services, ParTecs offers NonProfit Desktop Environment a complete free/open-source (FOSS) desktop solution for member-based non-profit organizations, which includes FOSS operating system in multiple languages and practically all the desktop software you can ever need.
ParTecs NPDE, is derived from Debian GNU/Linux operating systems, the largest Free/open-source project in the world, as well as Debian-NP.
Try ParTecs NPDE Today ! ! !
1.Download the latest CD-image and Readme.txt file from our website at: http://www.partecs.com/npde/latest -2.Burn a CD-rom -3.Insert the CD in any computer -4.Reboot your PC -5.Try it as a "LiveCD" without installing a single file on your PC. -6.Click on "Install on your PC" icon on your desktop if liked it, after reading the "readme" file.
ParTecs SRL offers planning and consulting services in regards to migration from proprietary to free/open-source desktop operating systems and applications solutions to non-profits, including ParTecs NPDE and Debian-NP. ParTecs SRL top staff has exclusive expertise in this field. Our top technical staff currently leads the Debian-NP Subdistribution.
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