Free and Open Source Projects in New Zealand

openWolf is designed to check websites for Web Accessibility Initiative priorities and New Zealand Web Standards compliance. Amongst other things, it can include stylesheets in the checks, compare colour contrasts, identify acronyms, handle bad HTML and much, much more.

The National Library of New Zealand created the Metadata Extraction Tool to programmatically extract preservation metadata from a range of file formats including PDF, image files, sound files and office documents.

The web Curator Tool is a collaborative effort by the National Library of New Zealand and the British Library designed to manage the kind of selective web harvesting undertaken by libraries and other collecting organisations seeking to preserve online digital content.

GeSHi is what it says on the box: a generic syntax highlighter. And an award-winning one at that. It started life in New Zealand as a project of Nigel McNie and has since attracted numerous contributors who have added support for dozens of programming languages.

Gerris Flow Solver is a very different software project but one in use around the world by scientists and engineers working in the field of fluid dynamics. It stands out in this field as an open source offering amongst a number of strong commercial packages, providing anyone with the curiosity and enthusiasm to explore fluid behaviours with a rich toolset. Its modular design means Gerris will continue to expand with a growing community of developers continuing to improve the core product.

In a knowledge economy, lifelong learning – both online and face-to-face – is increasingly relevant. Mahara is designed to provide people with a way to demonstrate their skills and development to a variety of audiences over time. With blogs, a resume builder and social networking, Mahara puts users in control and in touch with fellow learners, teachers and potential employers. A nationwide Mahara service is already available for schools and tertiary organisations in New Zealand: MyPortfolio.

Emusic/J is a project initiated by New Zealander Robin Sheat. An open source music downloader, Emusic/J has received financial support from classical music distributor Naxos and is the official music downloader for ClassicsOnline.

Bond is a rapid application development framework for building database applications. Bond uses a XML file for defining widget layout and database interactions. Bond dynamically populates widgets making them data-aware automatically at run time, removing the need for writing code to populate and manage GTK widgets.

Weka is another New Zealand open source project to come out of a research environment. In this case Waikato University’s Machine Learning Group. It is a world-class tool for exploring and extracting information from data. And a hugely popular one at that, with some 20-30,000 downloads per month from SourceForge over recent years. According to one nomination from Israel, Weka is the de facto standard in the machine learning community, used not because it is free, but because it is the best.

TheOpenDisc Project collects a wide selection of high quality Free and Open Source Software (for the Windows Platform) and makes them available in a single CD image. A project derived from the original OpenCD project, the software provided covers most of the major/common tasks undertaken, such as word processing, presentations, e-mail, web browsing, web design, and image manipulation. A branch of the project is known as the OpenEducationDisc and provides tools of particular value to the education sector.

This project started life as an artwork installation at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts in Manukau City. Turning drawings on paper into video games, Douglas Bagnall has released Te Tuhi under the GPL and partially ported it to the One Laptop Per Child XO platform. While the project is still a work in progress, it demonstrates to kids of all ages a whole new way to interact and understand the computer. Using Creative Commons sounds, open source tools and running on Linux, Te Tuhi adds to Douglas' portfolio of creative uses of free software.

Mātāpuna is a web-based tool developed for Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori / The Māori Language Commission to assist with compiling a Māori language dictionary. The system assists with many aspects of lexicography, including team collaboration, routine error and consistency checking, corpus searching, publishing, and progress monitoring in addition to the traditional headword and entry management.

Xinha is a well-regarded WYSIWYG HTML editor component for use in web browsers. By being highly configurable and extensible, Xinha makes it straightforward to build just the right editor for the job to hand in your web application.

From its origins as a locally produced web content management system, Silverstripe took the open source path and has never looked back. Scoring a major coup this year with the the US Democratic National Convention website, Silverstripe is firmly on the world stage for New Zealand and open source software. With some 250 websites already showcased, Silverstripe has proven to be a versatile and rapidly evolving framework.

Refinery CMS is a Ruby on Rails content management system that started at Resolve Digital in 2004 (http://www.resolvedigital.co.nz/). It was closed source for 5 years before becoming open source in 2009. It has quickly become the second most popular Ruby on Rails CMS and is growing rapidly. The project is contributed to nearly daily as it is core to Resolve Digital's business.

The project focuses on making the end user experience simple and understandable and offers developers brilliant tools to get a site developed quickly.

The NIWA Image Capture Analysis & Management System is funded by NIWA (National Institute for Water & Atmospheric Research) and is being developed by Catalyst IT. It builds on two existing FOSS applications, Imagej & Postgresql. NICAMS allows users to identify & record the (qualitative & quantitative) contents of photographs, supporting taxonomic & substrate content comprising point, line and region areas of interest.

Docvert takes office documents and quickly turns them into standards-compliant web pages, something that most organisations struggle with everyday. Started by Matthew Holloway, Docvert has been picked up by the US-based Public Knowledge Project, which is dedicated to improving the scholarly and public quality of research. Docvert helps non-technical editors and authors put their work online, significantly increasing global access to knowledge and academic research. Docvert is also in use by a number of government agencies keen to ensure long documents are highly accessible on their websites.

Knowledge creation is a key driver of sustainable economic growth in New Zealand, and wikis are playing an increasing role in this largely collaborative activity. Wikipublisher is a unique open source project, with an avid following overseas, that turns online wiki content into beautifully typeset pages. By creating knowledge online first, Wikipublisher makes it instantly and widely accessible, while providing high quality printable documents that many prefer to read.

Kete - the Māori word for 'basket' - provides a platform for developing community contributed content. The kete or basket is the overall organising structure for content. Beyond baskets content is organised by the community using tagging and relating pieces of content to each other. Kete is a Ruby on Rails application originally commissioned by the Horowhenua Library Trust and built by Katipo Communications.

eXe is an award winning authoring application to assist teachers and academics in the publishing of web content without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup.

OnlineGroups.Net has been providing custom collaborative sites for some five years, while methodically improving the GroupServer platform they run on. 2008 saw a milestone release of GroupServer – software that powers Steven Clift's Minnesota-based e-demoncracy.org community issues forums. The core team have invested considerable effort in making GroupServer scale to support large online groups, similar to Yahoo! or Google Groups.

The Amberdms Billing System is an open-source web application providing accounting, invoicing, service management and time management functions, designed for small and medium businesses.

Lead developer is Jethro Carr one of Wellington's leading lights in the FOSS and LUG community.

KEY FEATURES

Accounting

* Provides full double-entry accounting.
* Simple UI makes it easy to create invoices and handle finances
* Ability to export information to CSV or PDF formats

Time Keeping

The Kiaora Project provides a large number of Open Source programs for Windows that you might wish to have handy when fixing friend's computers and although many of these programs are on TheOpenCD, almost as many are not.

Docvert - some kiwi software to convert word documents to webpages

Website admins are often given the tedious task of converting Word documents into webpages.

Docvert takes word processor files (typically Microsoft's .DOC) and converts them to OpenDocument and webpages. It's easy to use, and developers can build formatting rulesets with XSLT or PHP. The software is free and runs on Windows, Linux and Apple OSX. It follows Web Standards, and adheres the E-Government Web Standards.

Greenstone is a suite of multilingual software for building and distributing digital library collections. Produced at the University of Waikato, the project has been developed and distributed through UNESCO and the Human Info organisation.

Koha is a library management system originally written by New Zealander Chris Cormack way back in 1999. It is used by 100s of libraries worldwide and has over 40 active developers. Koha is also now based in the States as part of a stable of products from open source library provider Liblime. Koha enjoys strong support from the libraries here in New Zealand that contributed to Koha’s development, and continue to use it to this day. Horowhenua Library Trust in particular were early to recognise Koha’s strengths.