GOSCON report

[Tim Ney <ten gnome org>]

Sri,

Sorry you could not get to Portland for GOSCON.  I learned a lot and
left very optimistic about the future.

The Government Open Source Conference was organized by Oregon State
University's Open Source Lab (OSUOSL.) It was attended by about 200
State CIOs and public sector IT Managers from 17 States including
Virginia, New Mexico, Idaho, California, Washington, Montana, Utah, New
York, South Carolina, as well as the country of Argentina.

Since  I was the only speaker on the desktop and several speakers
covered return on investment and licensing issues in depth, I talked
about two subjects:

*implementation of the GNOME Desktop 
in Sao Paolo telecenters, the Itaipu power plant and
Extremadura/Andalucia with references to Macedonia and Largo.

*working with the community 
(mailing lists, maintainers)

The feedback I received was positive, if cautious. One attorney in the
front row of my talk said she had no idea that these desktop deployments
were taking place around the world.

One of the other speakers was Linda Hamel, general counsel of the
Information Technology Division for the commonwealth of Massachusetts,
who covered licensing and the state's recent adoption of OpenDocument
format
<http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office>.

Those of you who were at GUADEC in Kristiansand may have attended the
roundtables on open standards conducted by Bob Stack, who was CTO
of Massachusetts.

It was clear at GOSCON that agencies in other states will follow
the lead of my home state Massachusetts.  One thing that impressed me
was to hear officials speak about the Cathedral and the Bazaar.
They were also looking to customize software in a way that would be
useful not only to their own state agency, but could be shared with
like agencies in other states.  The savings gained in software costs by
a human services department, for example, can go back into the core
services provided by that agency.

Having spent time working with governments in other countries over
the last few years, it was encouraging to see the first steps of
adoption now taking place in the U.S.  

tim