Re: Public administrations

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

Thanks, Sebastian, for the feedback. :)

Germany seems to have similarities to your description, but there are
also differences. The open-government.org efforts, I described
in the previous mail, centers around a system administrator for a single
and rather small town. But he deployed Linux two years ago. Munich is
another example for the organization here.

Another example is a developer who helped on developing gnome-apps.org:
He lives in Jamaica and wrote a paper about the situation of the DSL
connections in his country after the last hurricane. Due to that paper
he got invited by government agencies to discuss the issue.

What I'm trying to say: There are lots of smaller countries in the
world, they are not as regulated as the U.S., and sometimes
the ways to governments can be quite short.

But your information seems to confirm what I already thought: It's
highly unlikely to find somebody to talk to, when you're from GNOME.
Those that do decide these issues simply never heard of us (yet).

Also, as you already wrote, public administration will likely listen to
a system integration business like IBM, RedHat, Sun, etc. When they say,
GNOME's not the right decision for a public deployment, we're out of the
game.

But that's not the complete story. 

We can do something: We can organize collaboration between Open
Source coders and potential users to get a solution going, and the
solution can be integrated into the desktop. That's the usual vertical
integration strategy of Microsoft (Office protecting Windows, Outlook
protecting its server).

We can also organize collaboration among users (i.e. interested persons
in public admninistration) to share experiences. That'll make the brand
GNOME more known among them, and system integrators will listen if
potential users requested GNOME because they tested it at home, and
shared Ubuntu or Fedora among their colleagues.


Regards, 

Claus