"What are we doing today Brain? Taking over the world like we always do."
Several weeks ago I went down to my hometown, Yass for Bonfire Night, which is on the Queen’s Birthday long weekend and often includes fireworks 🙂 Anyway, I camped out there with some family and friends (in sub 0 degrees temperatures) and took some pretty cool photos. Enjoy!
Check out all the photos here where there are also some explanations 🙂
I was really proud to be involved in Senator Lundy’s Foundations of Open Summit and wanted to follow up with some more resources. There are videos from all talks available, Donna just did a great blog post about it as did Brianna from Wikipedia.
It is important to recognise the initiative and interest of Senator Kate Lundy in openness, and I greatly thank her for her efforts in getting openness on the political agenda.
The submissions from the day (which all participants were open to contribute) are also online which all contribute to the 2020 Summit discussions are awesome. Some tidbits:
The rise of the use of FOSS in the IT industry is without doubt a revolutionary force that will have a huge impact on the way that society interacts with computers into the future. The question that I would like addressed by the Australia 2020 summit is what can be done to ensure that Australia can benefit to the maximum degree possible from this change in the IT world.
Andrew Tridgell – Freedom Fighter 🙂
It is widely acknowledged that open access to Crown copyright material is important not only as an element of open democracy, but is “a key driver of social, cultural and economic developmentâ€. With the emergence of digital technologies that enable dissemination of government material at low cost, copyright law is now the last significant barrier to truly open government.
Jessica Coates – Creative Commons
Establish a national mechanism for discoverability of spatial data. Discoverability is necessary to effectively deliver spatial data when and where it is needed, especially in emergencies but increasingly for general use, and would unlock enormous opportunities for innovation and creativity with the use of these data.
David Hocking, CEO ASIBA
Australia’s infrastructure will face even more difficult challenges unless we take advantage of IPv6, particularly for water and energy. For instance, critical energy and resource conservation measures will require large increases in the scope of control systems. There is an urgent need for greater national IP capability to use in reducing our global footprint in this way, but the capacity of our
current IP system is nearly exhausted.
Tony Hill – Internet Society of Australia
Amend the Broadcast Act to clearly define the fair use of broadcast material nationally for all educational institutions. Amend the role of Screen Rights to measure/clear international sources.
Clarify that educational organisations have clearance to use any free- to-air live broadcast services and to share them nationally within the academic realm for purposes of study, archive and analysis. As part of their participation in Australian society, any broadcaster supplying free-to-air (unencrypted) services anywhere within our shores would be bound to allow national open access to their material for educational use.
George Bray
Physical Infra-structure and facilities be made available for the schools sector to improve network speeds and bandwidth traffic loads.
Kevin Karp, StudentNet
Open information and knowledge – allow information produced by the public sector to be easily accessible and freely available to citizens and businesses for reuse, including commercialisation with appropriate exceptions such as law enforcement, security and privacy. Placing government produced IP in the public domain, such as maps and data, can unlock public and private value – U.S. property appraisal data makes www.zillow.com a more innovative service for home buyers than www.suburbview.com
Patrick McCormick, The Nous Group
Open Source is no longer an emerging technology. It is here now. OSIA[2] believes it’s in Australia’s best interest to not only adopt Open Source software, but actively contribute to the Open Source economy of ideas and innovation. Each of the 10 areas of focus for the 2020 Summit depend on the new reality of a global interconnected information economy. Google and Wikipedia were built with Open Source Software because it was the only way it could be done. Open Source Software enables us to compete, connect and communicate.
Donna Benjamin – Director – Open Source Industry Australia
If the potentially major transformative benefits to be derived from “Open†both from the technological and digital knowledge perspectives are to be fully realised then it is essential to establish or identify internationally credible standards and specifications etc. which support the desired outcomes. The real value and potential of PSI is realised only through its extensive re-use. Open will overcome the present major impediments which prevent this full potential from being realised.
Neale Hooper – Principal Lawyer, Whole of Government Licensing Project, Office of Economic and Statistical Research, Queensland Treasury
The availability of high speed broadband across Australia has the potential to reduce many problems of resourcing and access to information faced in Australia due to our dispersed population. Students and researchers in remote areas could be provided with equal access to quality resources and texts that students in metropolitan centres have. If every student has access to a computer and high speed broadband, then all students, regardless of socioeconomic status, can have access to knowledge.
However, the ADA is concerned that overly complex and restrictive provisions in the Copyright Act 1968 continue to impede this potential. […] In short, the ADA sees great potential in the digital education revolution, however, without significant copyright reform the ADA believes that students will have access to high speed broadband, but will not have the access to knowledge that should flow from this.
Laura Simes, Australian Digital Alliance
Laura Simes, Australian Digital Alliance
We have The Internet technology and we have the need. Many more activities need to be open and accessible, so that together we might advance the world instead of letting it slide into catastrophe.
Nick Sharp
Openness as a default position for ICT innovation and development provides many clear opportunities and advantages. Clear leadership and assistance is necessary from the Australian Government so individuals and organisations from all sectors can make informed decisions how openness can benefit them.
Me 🙂
Another news article about the event was in the Canberra Times, which had Jeff and I as the photo. Unexpected and a little odd 🙂
Many people know that the 2020 Summit participants list was put online a little while ago. I’ve had a chance to have a skim of the names and see who was accepted. Unfortunately I didn’t get in, but there are some great people involved.
I am quite concerned about the lack of technology and ICT people represented. There are a few great people represented, like Terry Cutler and Lisa Harvey but there is a serious lack of saavy ICT people. It was interesting to see Microsoft represented by Steve Vamos, and I truly hope that there has been some level of balance and foresight in the selection of ICT representatives to ensure multiple perspectives are presented.
I was surprised to see Sheryle Moon wasn’t there, and I don’t believe any of the Open Source community or industry nominations were accepted. I rang the office to express my concern that technology seems rather underrepresented, and that within the technology sector represented there is no clear representation from the Open Source industry or community (that I can see), which is arguably one of Australia’s greatest ICT assets when it comes to future directions and socio-economic opportunities.
Luckily, we have a great chance to have our say through the Foundations of Open local summit being run by the inspiring and well informed Senator Kate Lundy. She recently spoke at the Sdyney Document Freedom Day event, which apparently was brilliant (I was unfortunately out of the state). She also did a great speech at the 2005 Sydney Software Freedom Day event.
Senator Kate Lundy is hosting a fantastic event called the Foundations of Open: Technology and Digital Knowledge. It will include Open Source, Open Standards, Creative Commons, geospatial systems and open data, and IPV6 amongst other things.
The idea is to bring some great people together in a room and to have an open event which anyone can participate in over the web. The outcome of this event will be an input to the main 2020 Summit a couple of weeks later. There are a bunch of really great presenters and I know there will be several Open Source people there on the day (including Tridge, Rusty and us).
I’ll be speaking about specific things we could bring up for the 2020 Summit, including input from the Linux Australia report to the new Federal Treasurer, and ideas from other conversations with Government, the community and industry.
The Senator is using Moodle, streaming video on the day, and of course it is published on her Joomla website. Awesome! Great to see such rocking use of technology by a Senator! 🙂 Great work by Tom Worthington on the Moodle and he’ll be dealing with the streaming video on the day.
Today I saw a petition for getting equal pay for women in Australia. This is certainly an important goal however the goal of the petition is for the Government to “take action” to make it so:
I call on the Australian Government to take action to achieve equal pay for women.
Bold political leadership is required to change the legislative framework and shift cultural attitudes to close the 16% pay gap that currently exists between men and women.
I think there is certainly a place for Government leadership in this area, however I think a more important goal would be to provide information and resources for all Australians to know what they are worth and ensure they get the pay they deserve. I think there may be many reasons why women overall earn less than men, and some that are probably not malicious. For instance, many women don’t know what their jobs could earn and so don’t push for more money. Also now that collective bargaining is harder it is more difficult to know what your workmates are earning and to ensure you get the same.
There certainly are circumstances where women are prejudiced against in the workforce in terms of pay, and I believe the best way to combat this is to “arm the masses”. If you know what you are worth, then you won’t do with less. In a market where we have major skills shortages across the board (particularly in IT) people can ask for what they are worth and get it 🙂
I was really moved by Kevin Rudd’s speech this morning, where the Australian Government finally acknowledged the trauma and loss of Indigenous peoples in Australia through the misguided and destructive actions of the Australian Government for most of the 20th Century. This was done with a strong apology and commitment to making life better for Indigenous Australians through a bipartisan effort to bring about equal access to opportunities, better health, better education and other work to give Indigenous peoples the same opportunities and quality of life as other Australians.
It also made me feel for the first time in a long time that Australian politics can indeed be both inspiring and practical. It gave me a lot of hope for what is to come and to do my part in helping bring about a strong and united Australia. I hope that the lessons that we see from the Open Source community, were people can overcome gender, political, cultural, religious and all other divides to work together productively, can be brought to the broader Australian community.
The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) released a simple two page synopsis of their investigation into the use of FOSS in Federal Government agencies recently. They also have several interesting papers about FOSS on their Open Source software page. Some snippets include:
86% of agencies have a positive view of OSS and expect its usage to increase over the next 5 years
Agencies understand that by adopting OSS standards and solutions they could protect their investment in ICT systems, data and software
Agencies indicated their desire to be both vendor and format independent, with the high level of flexibility available to them by using OSS leading to an environment of innovation and transparency
And then the kicker:
OSS vendor support is perceived as problematic and was indicated as the biggest challenge facing OSS adoption by respondents.
Hopefully the soon to be released Census will help overcome the biggest challenge facing FOSS adoption in Government, and then 2008 will be a serious power year for FOSS in Australia 🙂 The report is due out in late February, and some teasers will be presented at linux.conf.au.
Today is Software Freedom Day all around the world. We have over 330 teams in over 90 countries participating, which makes it the biggest outreach event for software freedom in the world!
Check out an event near you!
So the actual Software Freedom Day 2007 shirts are a much nicer green than originally anticipated. So for all the people who weren’t fans, I think they might like this more 🙂 Male and female sizes available on the online store.
Having spent a long time in the FLOSS world both in community and industry roles, I started to see a serious disconnect between the industry and community perspectives on FLOSS about 5 years ago. I mean a disconnect that went beyond philosophical and into the practical, and this is largely because is a rapidly expanding userbase and industry around FLOSS. Community participants in FLOSS have a different understanding and expectation of openness than people in industry, and this difference is unfortunately being used to undermine the core values that make FLOSS more than just another technology set. The issue is that for all the well meaning of the 4 freedoms of the FSF or the Open Source Definition of the OSI, people can simply take those licences and not subscribe to any of the other attributes of openness that are expected of a FLOSS project and still get the good name of being a FLOSS project.
Openness has been proven time and time again to be the way forward. We saw it with TCP/IP, with HTTP, and now with FLOSS projects like Apache. Openness provides a platform for innovation, collaboration, an open and competitive market, and a sustainable approach to a digital future. In the same vein, a more closed approach may in some cases also be appropriate. For instance some popular and successful FLOSS projects have relatively closed development models controlled by an individual or a single company. An understanding of the degree of openness in software helps people understand the implications of the software model and also the implications in using the software.
In the spirit of discovering the core principles of openness, Jeff and I spent some time working on a model to help explain openness in such a way that it couldn’t not be undermined. We came up with 5 Foundations of Open:
As we can see, above is a far broader understanding of openness than is generally subscribed to. A project may decide to have a more closed approach to any of these 5 vectors, and sometimes for good reasons, however by looking at all software (not just FLOSS) using these vectors people will be able to have a good understanding of how open the software is and what that means for using it, developing on it, building a business around it and so on and so forth.
I’m currently building some metrics around this to help determine the openness of any software, and will announce here when it is done.
Edit: This is an idea Jeff and I have worked on for some time, so I can’t take all the credit 🙂 Thank you Jeff!