Category: Government

Thanks Canberra FOSSites :)

Yesterday afternoon a bunch of wonderful people came to meet for a coffee/beer at the All Bar Nun in Canberra. It was a great few hours and awesome to catch up with everyone that came (and a few new faces to attach to nicks :). I met up with Chris Smart who is behind the Kororaa project, Kristy Bennetts, David Symons (bimberi), Paul Wayper, Steve Walsh, Ingrid Finnane, Antti Roppola, Justin Freeman and more 🙂 Thanks everyone! I’ll definitely be coming back to Canberra soon as there were so many yummy dinners offered 🙂

I’ve also been talking to a bunch of Government agencies about FOSS and there will be some great new case studies of FOSS in research available on the ASK-OSS website in the coming weeks. Also, anyone in Sydney next week should take the opportunity to come along to a free legal and research seminar about FOSS, with Mark Webbink and Dan Ravicher speaking. Details on the ASK-OSS website.

Software Freedom Day – shirts and maps

Software Freedom Day 2006 is charging ahead with over 150 teams registered around the world. The board have decided to give 2 free shirts to each team and extra ones will be available to buy from our webstore for a mere AUD$20 each (including shipping) 🙂 They are bright orange and a rocking way to make your team stand out on the day 🙂 They will include a big SFD 2006 logo on the front.

Note: we can sort out something for teams from developing nations who need assistance in getting more shirts. Just drop an email to the SFD ctte on board@softwarefreedomday.org

Also, only about a third of all the registered teams have added their location to the SFD 2006 map, so get cracking! 🙂 The teams who had their details on the 2005 were not automatically added to the 2006 map, so put your team up now! 🙂

SFD 2006 map

Canberra truckin’

So I’m in Canberra all week this week, mostly in meetings about the ASK-OSS project, and a few Government meetings talking about FOSS. It has already been great, and there is a group of us putting together a statement recommending the use of Open Standards in Australian Government, which I’ll post as soon as it is finalised. We are also looking at doing a guide for FOSS software development in the public sector. Pretty cool stuff 🙂

I’m hoping to catch up with some of the local FOSSers, but I’ve missed the CLUG meeting, so I’m hoping to catch the programmers SIG and maybe a few people for a coffee/beer 🙂

Your freedom – a dream within an email

Below is something I’ve written up for one of the local universities to publish in their paper about Software Freedom Day. Feel free to copy and send to more people or organisations to try and get the point across. I’ve left the links there plain for easy copy and paste to an email 🙂

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights [1] is a set of basic human rights that most people would agree would be a bare minimum. Not often are our basic rights thought of in the context of technology, but with more and more our lives are dependent on technology, it is a rapidly growing concern. Technologies that matter to our freedom are used in our voting systems, our leisure, our work, education, art and our communication. What does this mean to you? It means that the basic human freedoms you take for granted are only as free as the technology they are based on.

Transparent and accountable technologies are vital to ensuring we can protect our freedoms. Think about e-Government systems such as electronic voting. When the systems running our voting is proprietary or closed, it means that we can’t be sure what the software actually does, so how can we trust the results? The issues with the Diebold [2] voting systems in the US is testament [3] to the need for transparent systems that are trustworthy. Think about other software you use everyday that is proprietary software and apply the fact that you can’t be sure what it is actually doing! Does your email system send copies of your mail to a third party? Is your web browser, logging and automatically sending your browse history to someone? The most interesting case recently was when Sony purposely added spyware [4] to theirmusic CDs that silently and automatically installed itself onto MicrosoftWindows systems to search for piracy breaches. Their greed has spawned a whole new wave of viruses and is a gross breach of privacy.

So what do I mean by transparent? Well some software gives you access to the source code, such as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) which ensures that you can know (or get checked) without any question what exactly a piece of software will do. It avoids nasty surprises, spyware, result rigging and all kinds of issues that we can’t be sure to avoid in proprietary software. Proprietary software keeps the source code locked away from public scrutiny which means that there is no way to know exactly what the software actually does, and no way to trust it to safeguard your human rights.

Software Freedom Day is a global initiative with over 150 countries participating on Saturday September 16th. Our event will be right here at UNSW and we will be having a full day of talks about this topic from political, media, arts and of course technology viewpoints. The day is completely free and there will be giveaways, prizes and further information about how you can do your bit to help ensure technology doesn’t act to lock down our human rights. Come along and meet a wide range of people, all working together to help ensure our freedoms are maintained by the technologies of tomorrow. The event information is up at http://softwarefreedomday.org/teams/oceania/au/sydney

[1] – http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
[2] – http://safevoting.org/videos/diebold_med.mov
[3] – http://www.bradblog.com/?p=2433
[4] – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4400148.stm

Software Freedom – important for trusting Government elections…

I just found this scary video (quicktime sorry!) which is apparently a bunch of Diebold employees talking about their system early in 2004.

Classic quotes include:

“We’ve certified other things that weren’t tested”

“I just want to make sure this machine can add. Remember we’ve recently had machines that didn’t add?”

Software freedom is about transparent systems that we can trust. Systems that underpin our freedoms, our Governments, our schools, our communication and entertainment.

What are you going to do for Software Freedom Day 2006?

Pia Waugh – “most awesome talk”

I’ve been speaking about FOSS at a lot of non-FOSS conferences recently, including the Go Girls event in Perth, a few school events, some NGO conferences and to some Universities around NSW. I’ll also soon be speaking at another couple of events aimed at school kids, Software Freedom Day in Sydney and strangely enough at a “telecentre” conference. Apparently a conference about the deployment of telecentres around Australia, a great place to talk about FOSS for sustainable networks 🙂

Anyway, I was very pleased to find out that my talk was rated the “most awesome” at the 2006 Go Girls event, as judged by about 2300 school girls. Rock on! Perhaps we’ll have a few more young people getting into FOSS from Perth 🙂

If every person in the Australian community did just one outreach project a year, even if it was just installing OpenOffice for someone, then imagine where we can be just a few years from now. In Australia, I estimate we have around 5000 people in our FOSS community (LUGs, developers, sysadmins, advocates, etc). 5000 people influencing 5000 people who in turn talk to their friends about it…. We could probably reach most of Australia in about 5 years if we tried 🙂

Women need “simple pleasures”

Mr Laurie said rural women, like their urban counterparts, needed simple pleasures such as going out for coffee and playing tennis together.

Wow, now I know what I’m missing in my life. Obviously not enough coffee and tennis time with the girls! Tee hee hee!

Comment made by the President of the NSW Farmers Association. Thanks Tongmaster for pointing this out. I love it when people demostrate their biases through what they probably think is a perfectly reasonable comment 🙂