Category: FOSS

New Zealand IT Minister gets Open Source

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!

7 principles for improving communities

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 🙂

You take the high road(show)

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) 🙂

New Zealand Open Source Awards – very professional!

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 🙂

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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!

Australian Open Source Census taking off!

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 🙂

The Australian Open Source Industry and Community Census – now live!

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.

Last AUUG conference ever

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 killers

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:

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
  • 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.

FOSS in Sydney education and busy times

A few days ago I did a short 1 hour talk on FOSS for about 30 IT teachers in Sydney. It was a lot of fun and it reminded me how spending just a little time can have such a great effect! Finding people who are keen to hear about and who can really use FOSS really helps the chances of success in your message having an impact. Thus far the people I’ve found to be most open to hearing about FOSS and also the concepts of Software Freedom, Free Knowledge and a digital democracy are teachers, activists, people in the NGO/non-profit sector and students. Politicians are also good to chat to, and there is a growing community of FOSS saavy lawyers too.

Any opportunity you get to talk to these people can often have a great flow on effect to their spheres of influence. I’ve had many occasions where someone I spoke to comes back to me months or years later to help them take it further, or to assist in some great scheme they’ve created with others.

It has been flat out recently. Jeff and I are working hard and getting some great new work (more news to come!), FOSS is really taking off in Australia in Government, corporate and education, and apart from being so flat out, life is really good 🙂

Software Freedom Day is only 5 weeks away, and the website (which is hosted by Canonical) is down and has been for 2 days. Terrible timing! We expect it to be back up soon and it isn’t slowing down our shipment or other plans, but we’ve no way to let the teams know that yet.