what are we doing today, brain?

Wow, this is really interesting. A website to help the average punter understand the net impact of the various world votes for OOXML ISO standardisation. It also collates all the OOXML comments, which I couldn’t find elsewhere.

Awesome job by Matthew Cruickshank, who is one of the speakers at the OOXML event on December 14th.

The Australian Open Source Industry and Community Census 2007 closes in two days, so please get in and complete the Industry Census for your company, and/or the Community Census for yourself, and please let other companies or community members know.

The aim of this project is to raise the profile of our industry and community, so stand up and be counted! Companies have the option to be included in a business directory that lists your skills, contacts details and spiel only, and individuals have the option to be in the running for a GP2X gaming unit.

The report will be freely available in February and distributed to Government and the general public.

Responding to survey results prepared recently by OSIA, the Australian Labor Party, the Liberal-National Coalition, the Australian Democrats and the Australian Greens have all voiced strong support for the adoption of Free and Open Source Software for both boosting local ICT development and ensuring open and interoperable standards.

Awesome work by Open Source Industry Australia in this excellent little document that outlines the perspectives of all the major parties towards Open Source.

In the answers, Labor refers to their “10 year strategy for software” which was announced in 2004. In it was this little gem:

A 10-year strategy for software and digital content would also be created under a Labor government, Lundy said. This strategy would aim to increase the local software industry’s global market share by focusing on open source development and partnering with SMEs.

The change in Government has provided the FOSS community and industry a real opportunity to get FOSS on the political agenda, and into a meaningful discussion about the broader benefits FOSS can offer both economically and socially to Australia.

I am helping coordinate the first ever Australian event to really delve into the technical and legal practical feasibility of OOXML. It will be on December 14th, and will include experts from Australia and around the world. The schedule is currently up, however all the speakers names will be published in the coming week. There will also be participation from Microsoft, so if you have outstanding technical or legal questions about OOXML, you should come along and participate! The attendees will be a combination of the general public, academia, standards people and our course domain experts.

It will not be a political event, as there are enough of those around The aim here is to have a calm and open discussion about the technical and legal feasibility of OOXML. The top 10 or 20 technical comments of concern brought up from the ISO process will be analysed and industry players will be able to have a say. The end result will be a better understanding about OOXML to help inform those making the final decision on the Australian response to the ISO processing of OOXML in February 2008.

Now to my heading! I have found many people linking to the summary of ISO comments from around the world on OOXML, however it appears that the document is now protected by a password (see document 904, which I would like), as are several other documents that could be helpful for this event. If anyone has a copy of the summary of comments, I would really appreciate a copy so I can pull together the comments of most global concern for this event.

Last month saw the first ever Open Source Western Australia Symposium. It was an excellent event attracting over 60 CIOs from Government and top companies in WA to head about Open Source. Jeff and I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the event, and it was great to see such a diverse crowd of CIOs so interested in Open Source.

One of the things mentioned at the event was the recently launched Open Source WA survey, which emulates the AGIMO Open Source survey done earlier this year. The OSWA survey is for all users of Open Source in WA, be they Government, business or education, and calls on all users of Open Source software in WA to fill in the survey to help create a clear picture of the Open Source usage and needs of business, education and Government in WA. Waugh Partners is helping run the survey (on Open Source software) and afterwards to provide analysis of the anonymised data.

The organisers say there will be audio available from the event within the week, so keep an eye on the Open Source WA website! There was a news article about the event in PCWorld, which is mainly an interview with one of the speakers, Craig Nielsen from Red Hat.

The group behind this initiative is the Western Australian Supercomputer Program, which was funded by the Western Australia Department of Industry and Resources to run the event. WASP have also been involved with the Perth Linux User Group and basically ran the Perth Software Freedom Day event, which was excellent! Great work guys!

The Software Freedom International Board are currently judging the best SFD07 competition entries, and there is a great video about the Mt Gambier Software Freedom Day event which made it to WIN news in Australia. Nice one to Peter and the team there

The winners of the SFD07 competition will be announced in November.

I’ve spoken to thousands of school kids over the last few years trying to encourage young girls to consider IT as a career choice. Along the way it has become obvious that Gen Y doesn’t really care about IT as a valid career choice generally, not just girls. I’ve come to a few conclusions that I thought might be of interest.

I think there are two parts to the women in IT/FOSS debate specifically:

1) Women already in IT/FOSS
2) Getting more women into FOSS

The former ends up being a matter of support for those that need/like it, and for those that don’t it doesn’t matter. The second issue isn’t one that many women already in FOSS/IT can answer because most of us are not representative of the majority of women due to the interesting filtering mechanism of society and school that for various reasons turns many little girls off IT and therefore off FOSS (in some countries anyway, there are several countries where this isn’t the case).

I do a lot of stuff in category 2, as I’m trying to understand why young people generally are turned off IT and thus FOSS, and I’ve come to the following conclusions:

• Job perception - IT is seen as being anti-social, boring, and something that only “nerdy” boys get into. I always stand in front of these kids and proudly declare I am a geek (which I define as a person who does cool stuff with tech) which blows their minds. A young, extrovert female who loves travelling and trying to help make a better world. I talk to them about the variety of jobs available and about how IT is always changing and fun to get into, which is information they simply aren’t getting from school at the moment. We could all take a little bit of time to talk to schools in our local areas to help the careers advisors, teacher and parents to know more about why IT is an important option for kids to consider
• Role models - there aren’t many female IT role models actively influencing the choices of young women. This also gives young men that come into the industry incorrect assumptions about women in IT, so women being visible is really important for young people in general. Getting more young women and men working in IT out there as role models is important in getting more young people interested in IT across the board
• Active turn-offs - teachers and parents actively tell kids to not go into IT, as they think there aren’t any jobs. I’m not kidding. I think this has even more of an impact on girls as they are more career focused earlier in their school life and thus make subject choices much earlier that takes them away from the possibility of discovering the fun and challenges of IT careers
• Social awareness - kids today are more socially aware than ever before, and they see IT as not a very socially beneficial jobset. This is where I usually bring out the OLPC and talk to them about using technology to improve the world and the lives of millions of underpriveleged people which gets them interested in IT more, and is also a great segway to getting them interested in FOSS

Hopefully that is a useful insight to some of the issues we are facing getting kids and particularly girls in IT today.

I went to a conference a while ago to give a talk about FOSS for the NGO sector, mainly speaking to cooperatives and non-profits. Another speaker there gave an excellent talk that I wrote down to blog and am only now getting around to it He basically spoke about how cooperatives can grow their communities and capacity when they are largely volunteer driven. The ideas below are largely around how to interact and encourage new participants, so it will likely be useful to every FOSS project out there. Everything he said made a huge amount of sense for the FOSS community, which is after all one big global cooperative

• Openness - be open to input and differences of ideas
• Inclusion - actively get people involved
• Relevance - there needs to be meaning behind getting involved to give participants responsibility and pride
• Respect - respect new members. Listen, ask questions, listen again
• Opportunities - create a positive environment full of opportunities, eg - training, mentors, facilitators
• Collaboration - help encourage groups of peers to collaborate. Don’t have “token” participants but rather everyone participating equally
• Fairness - ensure there is fairness and justice in the organisation, and that people consider others in their actions (like a code of conduct)

I’m sure there are many FOSS projects that could draw from all of those in growing and improving their communities

Jeff and I are now just over halfway through our national “Meet the Open Source Industry” roadshow.

It has been an excellent turn out in most cities, with great numbers in Brisbane, Darwin and Adelaide. Canberra wasn’t as well attended as we accidentally planned the event the morning after the long weekend, and Sydney was a little low on numbers due to over-busy Sydney people being slackers.

Tomorrow is the Perth event, and then next week is Melbourne and Hobart, all of which are looking great. Soon, we’ll publish slides from the roadshow including the Open Source companies we introduced all around the country!

Today is the Open Source Western Australia Symposium, a collaboration between the Department of Industry and Resources and the Western Australian Supercomputer Program. I helped them with some of their speakers and WASP have also created a good relationship with the Perth Linux User Group, which is cool. WASP even ran the Perth Software Freedom Day event.

Today they are also announcing the first major research project into the use of FOSS in the Western Australian Government and market, based on the national AGIMO survey into the use of FOSS in Federal Government earlier this year. Waugh Partners is running the survey and assisting with the analysis, which we are pretty excited about.

So the short of it is there is a lot happening, and we need to blog more regularly (hint, hint Jeff)

Jeff and I launched the Australian Open Source Indsutry and Community Census less than two days ago, and already have over 60 completed community responses and 20 completed industry responses,as well as a further 50 people sign up. Wow! Thank you everyone who has contributed. Please pass the word around and lets try and really make this a true census

Just to clarify a point, the target audience of the research project is a) people/companies in Australia and b) Australians overseas. It has an Australian focus specifically so that the final report (which will be freely available to download) will help educate and inform Australian Government, corporates and education about the realities rather than the perceptions of our industry and community locally. Hopefully it will reflect the strength, diversity and opportunities presented by the Australian Open Source industry and community, so everyone needs to stand up and be counted