Month: February 2007

NSW Government ICT discussion

A couple of nights ago Jeff and I attended a discussion where Minister Della Bosca and Shadow Minister Pearce (who are both in charge of ICT for their parties) spoke about ICT generally. It was quite good because they both understand that ICT is a driving factor for the economy, they both understand the need to encourage local innovators and the Aussie ICT industry (although they disagreed on how), and Minister Della Bosca is also knowledgable about Open Source, but only brought this up when asked directly.

The Minister spoke about the Governments role in encouraging local innovation by being a smart procurer of ICT, however didn’t talk about investment in the industry. Near the end a Greens representative (I’ve lost his name!) spoke about their concerns regarding ICT and mentioned Access and equity, Education and Open Source as their three areas of great interest, which was good however his message around Open Source was a little negative (monopolies monopolies monopolies!) rather than focusing on the positive opportunities of Open Source (innovation, local economy, meeting the trade deficit through exporting specialist Aussie services!).

It was certainly an interesting event, and I for one am glad that our current Minister in charge of ICT in NSW is one of three politicians who have stood up in Parliament and spoken about Open Source, so keep up the good work Minister Della Bosca, and also to the Greens and Liberal opposition in keeping a healthy debate on the topic going. ICT is only starting to become a real platform for political debate, and it is really high time considering the weight of the ICT trade deficit (about $19b) which is about 80% of our total trade deficit. We can’t do much about most of that spending (CD players, mobile phones, etc) however we can work hard to create a strong and specialised services industry that we can export and start to meet the ICT deficit.

links for 2007-02-20

Pancakes and FOSS – wrapup

Jeff and I are in Brisbane and tonight we had a huge turnout to come talk about FOSS and pancakes at the Pancake Manor in Brisbane. We had about 30 people all up including OSIAns, HUMBUGs, the people from the PHP meeting that was supposed to be on at the same time (but got cancelled) and some interesting individuals from Government, industry and Microsoft (gasp!). It was all in all a very fun and interesting night, and many thanks to everyone coming along!

Jeff took some great photos (and some not so great ones) that he’s uploaded to his flickr stream 🙂

Mitchell Baker – coming to Open CeBIT

As some of you know, Jeff and I are working on “Open CeBIT”, the Open Source expo and conference part of CeBIT 2007. This is the first time CeBIT will have such a huge range of the Open Source industry participating. CeBIT previously had an Open Source area however it had little input from the industry, so this year they’ve brought us in to make sure it rocks for both the industry and decision makers in business.

I’m coordinating the business conference, and I’m extremely happy with the line up:

  • Mitchell Baker – Mozilla Foundation
  • Mary Ann Fisher – IBM
  • Simon Phipps – Sun
  • Mark Spencer – Digium/Asterisk
  • … and lots of other excellent speakers

This is exactly the sort of event to get IT decision makers along to. The more that senior management understands Open Source, the better it is for everyone, hence our agreement to run an Open Source conference focused on business.

We announced our participation in Open CeBIT at our launch last year, which Jeff will be blogging about soon 🙂