At 08:40 AM Thursday 2/13/03 +1100, you wrote:
On Thu, 2003-02-13 at 05:28, K.S. Bhaskar wrote:Yes there is apparently going to be another one for the General Managers of Departments etc not IT -ish people.
> For those who live Down Under, the Australian Government appears to be
> getting interested in open source. Supposedly it will feature case
> studies from the "Department of Veterans' Affairs". I wonder if that
> means the Australian department or the American one.
> http://www.computerworld.com.au/idg2.nsf/All/EEED0C3151C5D4FFCA256CC90012E15
> 1!OpenDocument&n=Sections&c=Open+Systems
Thanks for this. There has been a ruckus in the local computer press
over the seminar because Microsoft was invited but none of the other
commercial system vendors. But the event is intended as an initial
briefing session for CIOs and CTOs of govt agencies, not as a
conference.
It is the oz Dept. I think I do somewhere have a bit more information as to what they were using it for but i cant find it just now - it might be on the NOIE site?I'm sure the reference is to the Australian Dept of Veterans' Affairs (which no longer runs any hospitals or medical services here - it just buys those services for veterans from other healthcare providers - mainly state government hospitals). No idea what they are using Linux for,
About 3 years ago I set up a network of 130 Public Access Terminals (PATs) [ they couldn't be called kiosks at the time because a large multinational company had the alleged contractual monopoly on anything called a government kiosk in Victoria! ] in hospital and Community health Services etc waiting rooms for the Victorian Department of Human Services (DHS). It was for the Better Health Channel - www.betterhealth.vic.gov.aubut there can't be many govt agencies which don't now have at least a few Linux boxes acting as mail or intranet Web servers. Of greater interest is CentreLink's (i.e. the from offices of the Dept of Social Security and related agencies) plans to roll out a few thousand Linux-based "self-service" information kiosks for use by their clients.
These all ran / run on Linux. They were free, 24/7/365, walkup, always on, no login or permissions required, in public spaces. No system wide downtime over the 3 years. The odd hard drive failure and keyboard smash only. (oh and the usual Telstra problems).
We put 3 kiosks in CentreLink Victorian Offices - their system doesn't allow for any real net access for the punters.
The system was maintained over the net from Perth WA, and also had a *whitelist* to block unwanted sites, and a sophisticated Management Information setup that allowed to flag machines not working, track usage sessions by time and site, even track URLs if needed, all accessible in a browser interface and exportable to a spreadsheet.
The company that won the contract to supply and run in open tender with ALL the big telecommunications companies putting in tenders, was www.pienetworks.com
The DHS has cut the ongoing funding last month even though the project was a roaring success - (not core business). A about 60 will continue to be run by agencies. Many small agencies could not afford to fund the ongoing costs mid budget cycle.
The kiosks were achieving a regular and growing usage at about 5,000 separate users a week. One of the interesting issues was the high usage in some homeless shelters and small communities. I have started a small paper on this.
The project was interesting because it is a use of Linux as a *desktop* and in a public arena with NO training of users and NO supervision of use. The take up was high and there were no usage issues. The users are clearly from the more marginalised sectors of the community as well.
I must say that at the time of contract the use of Linux in itself was not a big problem as pieNetworks had been operating kiosks like this for a few years, but , believe it or not, the biggest argument in the bureaucracy was the decision to go live on the net. At the time the prevailing wisedom (policy) was Multi Media on CDs distributed each month and touch screens. This was the big argument to win. Hard to believe now.
I have a few bits of paper I have written / put together if anyone would like to see them I can email them or perhaps load them onto my website. Let me know.
Tim
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TIM O'LEARY
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.strategos.com.au
