pTools Software today announced the completion of one of the largest public sector IT projects undertaken in Ireland to date. The HSE intranet, which is built on pTools Content Management Software (CMS), provides information and services for all of its 100,000 strong workforce, and will be regularly accessed by over 50,000 HSE staff from a network of more than 25,000 computers. Key features of the intranet include access to daily staff news, briefings and reports, staff email and contact directories, medical libraries and other resources. pTools was awarded the contract following a competitive tender process and worked with HSE ICT Services and the Communications divisions over an eighteen month period to deliver the new intranet. Known as HSEnet, it provides a single unified location for internal online content for all HSE staff and, since going live in November 2007, is already receiving more than 750 thousand page impressions per month and is expected to exceed 1 million page impressions in the coming months.

"The Web team chose Drupal 4.7 for the task. After working with the web team and a few other contributors for a few months, I built Haiku a new Web site that included not only more content, but most importantly more participation from the community. A few months months ago, when I helped start a Haiku user group in the San Francisco Bay Area started, I set up the NORCAL-HUG Web site using Drupal 5.0. In both cases, I learned how to use Drupal as a tool to empower communities, so that they become more participative and engaged in your project."

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"Every summer since 2005, Google has offered what is essentially a paid internship to open source groups. Students are offered the opportunity to work with open source development groups to complete projects, often resulting in significant advances for both the student’s knowledge and the developments they’ve worked on. These projects, combined or otherwise, are some of the biggest successes we’ve seen come out of Google’s Summer of Code."

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This site will allow you to contact the XOOPS Foundation directly: in order to request support for XOOPS related projects (liaison, conferences, exhibitions, publicity, documentation, representation, and more). It will also allow you to donate to future XOOPS Foundation projects, to allow the continued support to the Community & Project.

Brad Baker posted on the Joomla! Developer Network an article discussing how one can can contribute to their open source community. While Mr. Baker's article are focused on Joomla!, I think his comments could apply to any open source project. I especially like how he concludes his article.

There is no utopia. No one, and no project, is perfect. Do we have faults, yes, some of them may be more important to you than they are to me, however the fact remains, if you are here for Joomla, the structure is already in place (maybe not ideal, or perfect) for your contribution to be accepted. So, will you contribute? If so, I look forward to seeing you in the community, genuinely helping people, in any way you can, within the current provisions that exist.

Explaining to someone how an open source community actually works is difficult. In my opinion the author has captured with his words a universal truth regarding open source projects. Try replacing Joomla in the above excerpt with Wordpress, Drupal, Radiant, e107, mojoPortal, or another favorite open source project and you'll see what I mean.  Some experiences in open source are universal.