Re: GOSCON report

[Rajiv Vyas <r rvyas gmail com>]

Tim:

Which of the speakers did you find most interesting? Were there any
state CIOs as speakers and Who stood out (among state CIOs) in terms of
conviction, logic and also had their Return on Investment Calculations?

Thanks,

Rajiv



 
On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 19:55 -0400, Tim Ney wrote:
> 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
>