Yes Alan, Successful products/ developments today are customer inclusive. Including them at the LoCo level is a good idea. Although how skilfully this can be done requires some consideration.
My experience is that local government (Councils) are desperate to discover and become a part of the technology/ internet scene and learn how it works. Having invested largely in other now declining sectors over the past 20 years, for example retail. The emphasis is shifting back towards a 'skills based' rather than a consumer-based economy. My sense is that social enterprise would provide the most interested people. Since their approach is similar to that of the open-source community. Plus the fact they already have a 'change-mindset.'In wanting to serve the community with ideas that originally came from a minority base : like Ubuntu. John On Sun, 2011-06-26 at 10:01 +0100, Alan Bell wrote: > On 25/06/11 11:45, Yorvyk wrote: > > On Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:24:51 +0100 > > Carlos Ferreira<[email protected]> wrote: > > > >> The UK team should be talking to Universities and other public services, > >> doing advocacy and trying to figure out what the obstacles to the adoption > >> of free software are, and how they can be overcome. In fact, it's something > >> I'd like to do myself. > >> > > The problem with this idea is that you have to find somebody with influence > > who is willing to listen to some oik that's just wandered in off the street > > and is telling them their IT strategy is wrong. That's how it was > > described to me by a senior IT bod at a council. His suggestion was that > > Canonical need to be doing this sort of thing with professional 'sales' > > people. > they do, we sometimes work with them. There are several consultancy > companies working with local governments and at national level to > promote and advocate software freedom. I am involved in some of this and > hope to give a more wide ranging update on it in a few weeks. > > Also the philosophy of Open Source doesn't really wash, what’s needed is > > numbers in Pounds Stirling. > Somewhat true, but vendor lock in is a bit of a driver. A lot of the > standard Free Software arguments don't really apply at government level. > "you can adapt the software to your needs" - "yeah, we just pay them to > do that" > "what if your requirements are not on the vendor's roadmap" - "we tell > them what their roadmap is and they do it" > "what if the vendor goes out of business?" - "nobody goes out of > business if they are trading with us" > "what if you want to audit the source code to see what it does?" - "we > demand to see it and they let us" > > so they actually do understand and value the benefits of software > freedom, they just are used to paying for most of it. Economic arguments > have some traction, freedom to reuse software is of value, freedom from > having to count users for license compliance is of value. > > Anyhow, back to the point. The stuff we should be doing as a LoCo is > providing a community for the public and private sector to join. With > community support there is no helper/helpee distinction, and I don't > want to create one, it is a user group that shares technical support > knowledge and helps each other, not a technical support service. The > public sector at the moment has a real lack of community understanding, > they are used to, and comfortable with, a customer/vendor relationship. > The main failing I see at the moment is a tendency in their open source > strategies to attempt to treat "the Open Source community" as a > supplier, I don't want them to procure stuff from the community. I want > them to join and be part of the community. > > Alan. > -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
