So yesterday I went to the ACS ICT in Government conference, and was chuffed to see a lot of Open Source mentioned in talks, when it looked like there wouldn’t be any 🙂 In Edward Mandlas opening talk I listened to his points about needing to grow “IP” creation in Australia (he said we barely make any software here, he should check out the Open Source scene), needing to address our trade deficit, needing to become creators and not just users of ICT and asked the question whether we should leverage Open Source more as an industry to solve these and other issues. He only hesitated for a moment, and then very strongly said yes, which was great. Always good to get that kind of affirmation, particularly from bodies that are quite middle ground.
We got to hear about what the Bureau of Statistics in a new project completely based on Open Source, the National Data Network. Unfortunately they’ve made the system a client/server system and the client only runs on Windows, but it is nice to see Government agencies at least satisfying their technical needs with Open Source all over the place 🙂