Category: Government

My Dad will be so proud 🙂

Last night Sara Kaan and I were invited to present on a small panel about Open Source and the concept of a commons to a largely Greens audience. It was a great event, even after being advertised as fairly extreme (which it wasn’t) :). I put forward some views that Open Source can solve real social and economic issues for our country, which went down well, and then that working cooperatively with the Government is useful, the Australian Government is actually starting to understand and where useful embrace Open Source, and that patents as a concept isn’t completely evil in that granting a temporary short term monopoly to an inventor can be incentive to create, however the evil is in the implementation and broadening of what can be patented and that large companies run the show now, not the inventors by any stretch of the imagination. Anyway, these last points were obviously quite controvertial to some of this crowd, but it did get people thinking. There was much debate and it was a really fun night. It’d be great if there were more open forums right across the board and I’m certainly happy to help out with any that come up. I’ve got two NGO/Co-op functions coming up, a few industry functions, and a bunch of Open Source events. I’m certainly keeping myself busy 🙂

Cool, it isn’t often you get press coverage just for changing career direction 🙂

I have moved on from Volante, and am now starting the most exciting period in my career. I realised very quickly that my biggest asset at the moment is my neutrality in the Open Source market. I have not aligned with any vendors and thus am in one of the best positions to give neutral and practised advice about creating Open Source strategies, doing research on Open Source in Australia, assisting Aussie Open Source companies to succeed, and generally driving Open Source in Australia forward. I also plan to use this opportunity to solve social and economic problems with Open Source by participating more in commnity centre and school rollouts (such as recently in Nhulunbuy), and by getting Open Source onto the political agenda by speaking to as many politicians as I can with a polished set of points and examples (currently on discussion on osia and linux-aus for anyone interested). This is something that needs to be done, and I’m quite excited to be taking the opportunity to our pollies.

My first actual contract is doing some consulting for Linuxworld Australia which is in March 2006, ensuring they have a relevant conference programme (to be announced in about 3 weeks), that all the right people are there, and that the business and Government community in Australia get all the information they need to move forward, with all the right partners. My biggest challenge is to get the word out there. So few people even know it is on at the moment, and yet it is the biggest and first real opportunity for Australian business and Government to get the information they need, see the case studies all in one place, and meet the businesses working in Open Source. If anyone is interested in sponsoring or speaking at LWE, please drop me a line at pia at waugh.id.au.

It is sad but true that mining companies define the living standards, they control the power, water and everything that a lot of outback remote and rural communities life. Yet again I’ve heard of a large mining company that plans to just redirect a river, seemingly without any care or consensus of the local people. Up an Nhulunbuy the miners had electricity still running when even the local public hospital didn’t have power, because keeping the miners happy is more important that the health of the locals. Pretty scary stuff.

Coles Myer are offering an IT scholarship for women. Rock on!

Several months ago, I presented to the Riverwood Community Cente about Linux, and they were so excited they went out and installed a lab of second hand machines running Linux. I helped facilitate getting some spare parts from Computerbank NSW so they could have some more machines, and it was all running very smoothly. They were most excited that they could give the software away to people visiting the centre and that they could use the Ubuntu LiveCd to boot up into multiple languages easily for teaching elderly Arabic and Chinese women amongst others. Anyway, they very recently had an issue where some idiot set fire to their computer room. Most monitors died, and several machines. Luckily I still had a motza of monitors and a few PCs that were originally going to Nhulunbuy but we didn’t need them up there (plus, couriering to Gove is quite expensive). So I donated all the hardware to them to get the computer room up and running again. The room itself needs repairing, but with the new machines when the room is ready, they should have about 10 machines up and going to public access again soon.

I really do think that only the smallest effort can make someone else so much better off. Good luck Paul with getting it all up and running again 🙂

This last few days has really been amazing. I had coordinated with a few people in Brisbane and Darwin to get 5 of us over a few weeks out to Nhulunbuy, a small town fair smack in the middle of Arhnem Land, Northern Territory. The town is a mining town with a strong local and surrounding Indigenous community, and it was really a pleasure to meet some of the great people there. We set up 10 computers for the Miwatj Health Community Centre (plus a mock website for them which is coming along), 3 computers for another health centre out of town and 2 computers for a crisis clinic in the area. We used Linux on most of the machines, namely Ubuntu with an enticing set of icons, set up some useful applications for general use (note, Sokar, Jeff and I in the latter), and then watched people have fun. It turned out we could have used Linux on all the Miwatj (pronounced me-watch) machines as the single M$ application they need for the health training runs on the terminal server there and the Ubuntu terminal server client does the trick nicely. It could have been a bit better coordinated with other local groups there, however we had an alright turnout to the opening and the people there were very impressed with the end product. Also we had some guys come to the opening interested in making an Open Source event tracker for a community-run initiative to solve issues such as drug and alcohol abuse locally and in a culturally effective fashion. I will certainly be speaking to them again soon 🙂

All up, we spent 2 days building, hacking, and working around power outages, network outages, and dodgy hardware and a third day to show it off and talk to the local campus of the Charles Darwin Uni. We ended up with a perfectly working lab that will be more useful to the general public there as a resource, rather than just for health training. I’ll have a short video out soon, but the 3 days finished with a perfect sunset. A wonderful job by Jeff of CDU, Horatio from Brisbane, Geoffrey from Sydney, and of course Sokar. Interestingly when Jeff and I were waiting at the Nhulunbuy airport for Sokar to meet us, we both realised we had no idea what she looked like. When she came in, amongst many other people she and I recognised each other immediately. It turns out we are probably each on either side of the same mirror 🙂 She is an amazing and driven woman who is achieving some pretty cool things. At any rate it was wonderful to meet everyone, and work with everyone, and I think we’ve done a great job that lays a foundation for many more such projects. We’ve already started planning for a few more community centres in remote and rural Australia, so if you have any communities in mind that you think need help, let me know. I believe this is one of the best contributions an Open Source advocate could make to their cause. Getting out there and getting their hands dirty, using Open Source to solve social problems and actually help people.

Rock on Nhulunbuy! A video blog soon to follow.

“I think you might have gone overboard with your policies, I think you might have gone overboard with your lies. I think you might have gone overboard with your politics, I wish someone would throw you overboard, cause when you’re overboard you can’t play with people’s lives.”

Great song from The Taken, some of the Ozlabs crew from Canberra. Rock on, and a valuable lesson for our Prime Minister 🙂

I think it is quite interesting that at a conference claiming to deliver a valuable insight into todays major ICT issues there appears to only be two speakers discussing Open Source, and both are from a Government agency. I also find interesting that there is not a single female keynote speaker, and none of the Linux associated companies are there. Where is IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, Novell, Red Hat and the rest? It is apparently an Asia-Pacific wide conference. Weird.

This looks like a pretty big event, and I would have liked to have gone except I’m going to Nhulunbuy *tonight* to help set up some infrastructure for a community centre, which will be great! More on that later.