On Thursday 05 Feb 2009 6:41:41 pm Venkatesh Hariharan wrote: > A draft FOSS manifesto for Indian political parties > > The Free and Open Source Software community in India calls upon > political parties to make FOSS usage and promotion a central part of > the IT, e-government and education plans in their election manifestos.
The idea is a good one - but the approach is wrong. Are we demanding this to be done or are we selling the idea to them? Any politician who reads this will turn to his PA and ask who are the members of this community, how many votes do they have and who are their leaders. Answer - membership is ill defined, most of them don't vote anyway - and if they did, impact is negligible and they don't have any leaders or representatives. Politicians don't make policy - they follow the leader who can get them elected. And the leaders follow policies that will get them votes - or some such benefit. In my experience one of the best ways of convincing them is to show them that other countries are doing it and are getting a head start over us. Point to Munich opting for FOSS - it is a western city eminently suitable for a study tour ;-). China, Brazil, South Africa are all getting ahead of us. NASA uses FOSS - the state of Hawaii runs on FOSS etc etc. Once the attention of a particular leader is got - he hands the thing to his advisers who may be fairly literate. Here we need massive paperwork to impress them - a good starting point is: http://nrcfosshelpline.in/playing/InitialComments With community effort it is easy to build a good document. This LUG has shown that spirit once when the Linux Brochure was made. Maybe it can do it again? Calling on them to do it in the name of a community that is impossible to define will make all the signatories feel good - but will be filed in the waste paper basket. What is described above is known as lobbying - in America it is professionally done, here shortcuts are used, but we do not have the finances for shortcuts. So if we want to do it, we have to do it the hard way. -- regards Kenneth Gonsalves Associate NRC-FOSS http://nrcfosshelpline.in/web/ -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
