Nov 11, 2009 (PRN): An open source project run by a regional broadband consortium has been nominated for a prestigious national IT award. The National Digital Resource Bank (ndrb) is a finalist in the eGovernment National Awards' Local e-Government excellence category because it has shown how affordable technology can be leveraged to give nationwide access to locally-funded educational resources. The North West Learning Grid and government-accredited open source provider Sirius Corporation plc have partnered with JANET, the UK's education network, to make the ndrb a reality.

The ndrb is essentially a gigantic online swapshop. Teachers can hit "Search" and gain access to educational resources designed and tested by their 400,000 colleagues across the country. Hours spent concocting lesson plans late into the night will become a thing of the past. Students can download educational videos, exercises and audio clips. And, unlike what Google throws up, everything is quality assured and copyright safe.

UK Government CIO John Suffolk will reveal the winners on 20th January at a Ministerial dinner at the City of London's Guildhall.

Fiona Iglesias, Project Manager, North West Learning Grid said: "We hope the ndrb will become the single most important resource for teachers. The idea is to pull together all the resources created by teachers, schools and public funding into one central location. It is in every school's interest to put their resources into the pot, because they each get back so many times what they put in.

"There is already an estimated £150m-worth of digital resources out there in schools and Local Authorities that are not being shared and ndrb bring all of these and make them available to every member Local Authority's schools. There will also be significant contributions from industry, charities and national archives."

Mark Taylor, CEO, Sirius Corporation plc said: "ndrb has been a very challenging project to deploy both is size and complexity. It is built on software developed by the Spanish government. The process of open sourcing it has enabled us to optimise the system for the UK and, hopefully, get developers all over the world working on the codebase.

"We're thrilled that the ndrb is a finalist for such a prestigious award but we're equally excited that it has shown open source software is ready for large public sector projects and the only way to deliver real, sustained value at low cost."

[Wired by: PressReleaseNetwork.com]

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