Category: Government

Last night I went to see a performance by top Chinese artists, who also happened to have disabilities ranging from sight impairment, to hearing loss, or lack of limbs. It was an incredible performance, particularly the hearing impaired dance troup and the sight impaired pianist who was brilliant! It got a little overdone at times in terms of over-emphasising the specific disabilities, I mean these people were amazing, and trying to play the pity factor was odd. The MC was horrendous, missing his cues, misreading stuff, and being quite rude to the performers, although he probably thought he was being nice. Anyway, well worth seeing!

This quote amused me greatly from the Citizens Against Government Waste website. These are the guys who were apparently paid to put out a ridiculous press statement about the Massachusetts Government choice to move to open formats for data, namely the OpenDocument foo found in OpenOffice. There was a great article about the MS response to the Massachusetts Government about this decision.

“To advocate an efficient, sound, honest government is neither left-wing nor right-wing, it is just plain right.”
— J. Peter Grace, Co-founder CAGW

It is indeed, just plain Right 😉

I am appalled at this article. I don’t understand why there is this absurd link made between being gay and being a paedophile, and I’m disgusted that our own media is happy to reinforce it. Aren’t we better than this? I guess we are going down the rabbit hole and it is only going to get worse for the next few years.

As usual, I’m late to pick up on a wacky fad 😉

create your own visited countries map

So I didn’t quite expect so much of a response to my comments about who makes decisions in this country. But I’d like to pose a few questions:

• How easy is it for women to get into politics? I attended a conference a few days ago that told me two things, firstly it is damn hard to get in and play the boys club rules, and second, most of the successful women in politics are successful because they deny their own gender, and play by mens rules. Only one woman at the whole conference mentioned that although there are more women than ever in Aussie politics, that womens issues are completely off the political agenda. We still have idiots like Tony Abbot trying to make comments about a womans right to abortion as a choice, and trying to encourage young people to abstain from sex rather than educating them for safe sex. We are heading backwards!
• Anthony, putting all the factors together you get a small percentage of the populations demography. I don’t think it is an unreasonable suggestion that we get a broader spread of the demography into decision making for policies that affect all of us.
• I agree with Leon that not enough young people get into politics. As someone who only started getting into politics in the last 4 years, I can relate to that. I think if current events, and the beginning of our democracy were more explored at school, rather than the staleness of “here is the senate”, and “here is the house of reps” then more people would get into politics at a younger age. It was very interesting and stimulating for me to learn about some of the policies this country was based on, and both saddening and exciting to see how we have or haven’t changed. I also believe it is probably a good tactic for the government to not better this education, because kids who know nothing, vote the way their parents do (typically) thus maintaining the status quo. A fairly clever tactic.
• In Brazil I had a bit of an epiphany. I saw politicians who talk from the pulpit and then go out to beers with the people. I saw politics and people mixing. In Australia the average person and their life is so far removed from politics that how are we ever going to hope for decent reflective politics that are relevant to the average person? I like the idea of people entering politics later in life, after they’ve actually _worked_ in a real job for a few years. A country run by lawyers and career politicians bodes badly for anyone! I get continually frustrated by the team sports I see in politics, and the people more interested in clever quips that outperform the other party rather than solving problems. Perhaps I should have added “lawyers/career politicans to my definition of the “decision makers” in this country.

I guess I’d like to see some changes, not sure what yet, but a parliament made up of people that understand the average Aussie, and who reflect a little better the diversity found in this country would be a good start.

This is just a little note about Sergio Amadeu resigning recently. It is such a pity, he was one of Open Sources biggest advocates in Brazilian Government, and in the world. I met him at Software Livre last year, and wish him all the best in whatever he is putting his efforts into from here. Good luck Sergio, it was a pleasure to meet you!

Last week I spent two days at a conference called Going Public, a conference about women in the public sector and politics. It was fantastic! Firstly I got to hear extremely eloquent and strong speakers such as Cheryl Kernot (a wonderful woman completely misrepresented by our ridiculous media, she knows Linux too :), Julia Gillard, Tanya Plibersek, and Lynette Riley-Mundine. I saw Australias youngest Mayor, Janie Dickenson, and met many successful women in Australian politics. One of the most interesting talks was from Christine Milne, a Federal Greens senator, who basically said that womens issue were not on the political agenda anymore, and called for women in the public sector to try and make life better for all women rather than just succeed in their own careers by working around the issues. It was a really interesting few days, and I feel pretty inspired 🙂 I have to say my studies in politics at Uni have always been very useful in my work and in trying to communicate the importance of Open Source in solving real social problems. I think that if politics were taught better in school, as in the reality of current events and the effects of politics on our everyday lives, then perhaps we would have a more participatory community, and potentially a more reflective government. I have to say I only started getting into politics about 4 years ago, before which I was oblivious seeing it as stale and boring. That is so far from the reality, and I like to hope that if we had more average Aussies taking an interest in how Australia is run, then perhaps we wouldn’t be seeing such conservatism, and biased representation of our national community. Why is it that older, heterosexual, Christian, married, white males, who probably only make up ~16% of our totaly population are making the decisions for all of us? So much for representative politics 🙂

This is seriously the cutest mini-geek ever!

Wow, what a day! The Sydney SFD team had an amazing day, with three teams of four handing out close to 600 cds in the Sydney CBD (in three very different locations), and the installfest attracted a few newbies, a few geeks, and a few geeks who were newbies to the community, which was awesome! Welcome aboard dudes! We had over 20 people from SLUG turn up to help out, and the day was really a lot of fun for everyone. The cd’s found an interesting audience, and in some cases got to some really open-minded people really interested not only in “free” stuff but in “freedom” stuff and software that is “socially responsible” as Jeff put it. We had mums and dads, kids, young adults and even older people interested. There was some fun hardware at the installfest, and some talks given. Also Andrea from CSIRO came along to video the entire day, and the people involved, so as soon as she is able to get that out we’ll have an Aussie video for the day! The plan is to take the photos and video from around Australia and make a big post-event press article to celebrate the Aussie SFD effort and success! I’ve already heard from the Melbourne and Townsville teams who also had great days. I’m looking forward to seeing everyones photos!

The really important thing about handing out Free Software is the wonderful and inspiring conversations you can have. The ability to translate to someone outside the community about the values we all hold dear, regardless of our FS of preference. I had amazing discussions today, talking about freedom, and opportunities, about our community and about why it matters. I think Sydney did this really well, and the pamphlets we handed out really gave the people somewhere to get info, and a feeling of participation.

We gave out pamphlets with Janet’s What does Software Mean to You information, which is completely awesome, easy to understand as well as relavant to the average person, rock on Janet! Then we had a list of URLs on the other side with links to SLUG, Distrowatch, LA, and loads more useful information, including the very well written FLOSS Concept Booklet on wikipedia.

Many thanks to the Software Freedom International team, particularly Matt and Henrik who got us enough foo to give out around Australia and support us to rock out! Many thanks to all the SLUGgers for making our local event awesome! Many thanks to all the teams around Australia, I’m looking forward to hearing how everyone went! Lastly, many thanks to Linux Australia for being so supportive in making this a success! LA agreed to a bunch of things (obviously with my pestering 😉 including to cover the public liability insurance for all the teams in Australia, to fund some tshirts and postage of foo to teams, to fund some of the team expensives (on request), and for helping pimp the day! Rock on Australia!

Happy Software Freedom Day everyone!

It is awesome to see that Mikal and Steve are getting the mirroring project underway. If anyone has stuff that would be useful to mirror for ths FOSS community let them know about it 🙂