“Meet the Open Source Industry” roadshow – report

Jeff and I completed an Australia wide roadshow a couple of weeks ago visiting every capital city in Australia and showing off the local Open Source industry as well as pimping our Open Source Industry and Community Census (stand up and be counted!). The event went really well and we have a full write up about it on our website along with the slides and links to companies that participated, and an audio recording of the presentation.

Many thanks for all those who came along, helped out, and participated in the breakfast events. All up we were very pleased with it, and have had feedback that it has helped restart the conversation about Open Source with Government and businesses all around Australia. It was a good test run for doing similar kinds of events in future and helped us understand the relative levels of interest and capability right around Australia.

Open Source WA Symposium – Wrap up

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!

New Zealand IT Minister gets Open Source

I am still flabbergasted by an excellent speech I heard from the NZ IT Minister, David Cunliffe about Open Source at the New Zealand Open Source Awards recently. The speech was excellently written and delivered, and included some excellent tidbits including:

Today the raw material you deal with is not high-tensile steel: it is ones and zeros, data and code. And it makes no more sense to restrict how the raw material of the information age can be used, as it did to say that No 8 wire should be used solely for fencing. Wire, like code, can be put to any number of uses given the license to be creative, or dare I say, ingenious.

As both an elected Member and Minister of ICT, I am acutely aware of open source technologies and the contribution they make to the systems that support our core democratic processes here in New Zealand. For instance, the Register of Electors and the Electoral Management Systems – are built on open source technologies.

As those of you in the industry know, ultimately that capability is about people, not technology. Open source attracts some of the most talented of our developers and affords them the opportunity to engage globally with the best in the business.

And my personal favourite:

I challenge both public and private sector organisations to look again at some of the home-grown open source offerings and ask: Where better to invest than in building our local IT industry and our capability to make the most of what open source has to offer?

I believe there is video forthcoming from the event. There are already a few videos up from the New Zealand Open Source awards, so check it out!