"What are we doing today Brain? Taking over the world like we always do."
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.
Jeff and I completed an Australia wide roadshow a couple of weeks ago visiting every capital city in Australia and showing off the local Open Source industry as well as pimping our Open Source Industry and Community Census (stand up and be counted!). The event went really well and we have a full write up about it on our website along with the slides and links to companies that participated, and an audio recording of the presentation.
Many thanks for all those who came along, helped out, and participated in the breakfast events. All up we were very pleased with it, and have had feedback that it has helped restart the conversation about Open Source with Government and businesses all around Australia. It was a good test run for doing similar kinds of events in future and helped us understand the relative levels of interest and capability right around Australia.
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!