Welcome to the FTA Community Portal
You are currently at the FTA Community Portal, a space meant for sharing knowledge and participating in concrete activities related to FTA courses or Free Technologies in general. Let us briefly explain the basic idea of the FTA, its programme and this community space.
At a high level, the FTA strives to a) contribute to a society that permits all users to study, participate and build upon existing knowledge without restrictions; and b) contribute to the building of a critical mass in the use of Free Software and Open Standards.
In order to work towards this high level mission, the FTA has set up an international education programme and works for its expansion, improvement and recognition. More about the programme you can find on the FTA website. We work on this together with several universities, non-profit and for-profit organisations. At the core of the activities are the individual participants, who join as learners in FTA courses or participate in any of FTA's activities. In our view all help is needed to continue building the FTA as based on completly free (as in freedom) knowledge and based on Open Standards. The FTA partnership wants to open up as much of its infrastructure and resources so all interested participants can benefit. In that sense this community portal can be seen as a way to both facilitate learning as well as to make participation in FTA projects and activities accessible to more people.
This space is meant for you to generate your own profile, explain in what projects you are involved, discuss in groups about the FTA or related things. You name it, as long as it is about Free Technology and Free Culture, use this space as you like.
The FTA Community Portal is based on Mahara, which "is a fully featured electronic portfolio, weblog, resume builder and social networking system, connecting users and creating online communities. Mahara provides you with the tools to set up a personal learning and development environment." For more information you can read about Mahara. The FTA Campus team has integrated Mahara with the Moodle and University Campus framework.
You will need an FTA Campus user account to access the FTA Community Portal. If you're already a member of the FTA Campus, please login here. Otherwise you need to create a new account. Once you're logged in you will be able to access the FTA Community Portal from the FTA Campus main page. You will atomatically be added to the group "Getting Started" with the FTA Community Portal, while other groups of interest you might want to visit and/or join, such as: Campus Development, Curriculum Development. Here's an overview of FTA news, events, reports and so on.
