what are we doing today, brain?

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 still flabbergasted by an excellent speech I heard from the NZ IT Minister, David Cunliffe about Open Source at the New Zealand Open Source Awards recently. The speech was excellently written and delivered, and included some excellent tidbits including:

Today the raw material you deal with is not high-tensile steel: it is ones and zeros, data and code. And it makes no more sense to restrict how the raw material of the information age can be used, as it did to say that No 8 wire should be used solely for fencing. Wire, like code, can be put to any number of uses given the license to be creative, or dare I say, ingenious.

As both an elected Member and Minister of ICT, I am acutely aware of open source technologies and the contribution they make to the systems that support our core democratic processes here in New Zealand. For instance, the Register of Electors and the Electoral Management Systems – are built on open source technologies.

As those of you in the industry know, ultimately that capability is about people, not technology. Open source attracts some of the most talented of our developers and affords them the opportunity to engage globally with the best in the business.

And my personal favourite:

I challenge both public and private sector organisations to look again at some of the home-grown open source offerings and ask: Where better to invest than in building our local IT industry and our capability to make the most of what open source has to offer?

I believe there is video forthcoming from the event. There are already a few videos up from the New Zealand Open Source awards, so check it out!

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 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)

As a judge of the New Zealand Open Source Awards, I will be heading over for the awards ceremony with Jeff. I just received the tickets in the mail, and they look amazing

I think NZOSA is an excellent initiative and very _very_ professionally done. Well done to Don Christie, Chris Daish and the other people at Catalyst who started this great initiative!

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

Jeff and I have just launched the worlds biggest research project into the Open Source industry and community. We are looking at the size, strength and dynamics of the companies and individuals involved in Open Source. The final report will be freely available online and will hopefully show both Government and the general populace that we as an industry and community totally rock

So what are you waiting for! Stand up and be counted!

Check out the Census website for more details.

AUUG have just announced that this years AUUG conference will be the last one ever:

We expect this to be the last AUUG conference, so come and have a party.

I’ve been to two of the AUUG conferences, and they are usually pretty good. Seeing this is the last one, it’s a good chance to meet and greet with people who have been involved in Unix and Linux for quite a while. The call for papers is still open till September 10, so get a paper in

It’ll be in Melbourne, 13-14 October.

Sharepoint is scary. People that use it quite like it and are blissfully unaware of the sticky technology and licensing trap they’ve allowed into their environments. It provides some useful functions that could be found in many applications or bundled applications, however the trap is that once you deploy it, Microsoft have you pretty much under their thumb. You have to use their technologies, you have to use their office suite, their operating system, their data formats. It is very hard to move away from.

There are loads of articles written about this. I’ve put only a few interesting ones below:

• The Future of Lock-in, Microsoft’s two faces of SharePoint & While you were sleeping (The Sharepoint trojan horse) - Matt Asay
• Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software - Wall Street Journal

So Sharepoint is something that needs careful consideration. What are the alternatives? I don’t profess to be an expert in this space, however I’ve put a list of useful applications below that give you loads of great collaborative functionality:

• Alfresco - Enterprise Content Management (interesting article
• Clearspace by Jive (not Open Source, but looks interesting)
• O3Spaces - document centric collaboration
• Metadot - Open Source portal server

Plus of course all the other applications that are great for collaboration including Wikis, chat applications and loads more.