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!