The UN is such a huge, amorphous organisation that it is no suprise that there are bits of it that rarely make it into the limelight. A case in point is the UN Development Programme (UNDP), "the UN's global development network, an organization advocating for change and connecting countries to knowledge, experience and resources to help people build a better life."
Given its task, and its doubtless limited resources, it is only natural that the UNDP has been promoting free software use around the world longer than most (I first talked to them about it in 1997), and its efforts in this sphere are becoming significant. It now has a separate arm, the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Asia Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP) International Open Source Network - UNDPAPDIPIOSN for short.
As a quick glance at the home page shows, there's lot of good stuff going on, with all the right buzzwords. For example, news on the Asian Commons, a press release about the UNDPAPDIPIOSN joining the ODF Alliance, which pushes for ODF adoption (and complements the OpenDocument Fellowship I mentioned yesterday), plus some free software primers.
What I like about these is that they take a truly global view of things, providing information about open source adoption around the world that is hard to come by elsewhere, particularly in a consolidated form. They deserve to be better known - as does the UNDPAPDIPIOSN itself - although probably not under that name....(IOSN seems to be the preferred abbreviation).
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