pipka.org

“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.

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!