When I was working for a major vendor, Federal sales was well known as a specialist arena. So when GOSCON was being promoted I was dubious of the value to a small start-up, especially one run by two guys who have worked exclusively in Asia since the early ’90s. Anyhow – GOSCON was very useful for me, as a vendor, and more so for the government types who were there.
Of particular interest was Stephen Walli who reminded us that open source is not so totally different than that which we have dealt with over the years. Stephen has posted his slides, so go look for yourselves. Stephen is working on a cool new project which he will announce better than I can/should at this stage…
Bernard Golden gave a useful presentation on how to prepare for bringing open source into an organisation. He neatly bifurcates the areas to focus on helping organisations new to open source prepare and execute cleanly. I learnt that HeadWest is vends an open source process framework – good to know.
There were a number panel discussions that worked very well – the main drift was that people were asking how, not if they should implement open source – all good news.
The key message from the most vocal was that open source represents a chance for agencies to share and enhance over common interests and therefore save the tax payer significant amounts. Coming from 16 years in two totally different jurisdictions it was an eye opening event for me.
October 13, 2006 at 4:40 pm
Intresting post Simon.
What is GOSCON? Is there a link I use to get to the presentations you suggested?
Many thanks.
Alec
October 14, 2006 at 8:46 am
Alec,
GOSCON is the Government Open Source Conference – federal and state agencies are the primary audience and the content is geared for them. Most presenters will publish there slides, you can follow the link for Stephen Walli for his, the other may appear on the GOSCON.org site within a few days/weeks.
Simon.