Selling Open Source on the Campaign Trail

Waldo Jaquith writes: "I'm a long-time advocate and user of open source and free software and, as of this morning, I am a candidate for the Charlottesville, VA (USA) City Council. Naturally, I see lots of areas in Charlottesville's IT infrastructure (as well as potential areas of expansion) where Linux and various free software projects would be ideal. But can I make that a talking point while campaigning? How do I make that concept accessible and interesting to 40,000 citizens?"

Comments

40,000 or 400?

[spamkabuki]

I don't think you can make the general voting populace care about open source as a campaign issue. It will just distract from your other (I hope) sound campaign stances.

OTOH, campaigns aren't won by getting all the votes, just by getting enough. Elections can be decided by a slim margin. Will 400 more votes make the difference for you? Maybe.

You can talk about open source to the right people; LUGs, CS students at local schools, IT/tech workers, etc. Target your open source msg to these folks and bring in non-voters or sway fence-sitters in these groups.

Once you win, push open source solutions to save money. Tax payers love saving money on gov't budgets. You can then use this goodwill/political capital to get things done and/or continue to serve in gov't.

Open Source Spin

[yndrd]

Some general directions to try:

• Cite it as part of a drive to cut costs in the government.
• Ask why most of the software used by the government of a democracy is created by a single corporation.
• Include it as a point of reference to demonstrate ways you won't be doing business as usual (not the centerpiece, but one of many contributing factors).
• Mention that it may help create a more secure government web strategy (instead of Microsoft).
• Find out if there are open source companies/developers in your area and promote it as a way to fuel the local tech economy.

Those are just off the top of my head. I agree with other posters that not too many people are concerned with open source directly, but as a symbol of democracy, free market capitalism, and innovation, it might help you make some points.

Re:Hi, I don't really have a platform...

[Eloquence]

Your attitude is one of the main reasons it's so hard to achieve anything on the political level. Here's a guy who does something on a local scale, which could be a model for others if it's successful. He asks for input from the Slashdot "community", and people from all over the world reply what their political ideas are and how they think they could be turned into practice. Ideally, the guy will listen. That's exactly the kind of thing that needs to happen, and the open-source community (of which Slashdot is, like it or not, an advocacy channel) needs to push its people into politics, or to get the knowledge to the politicians.

As for the cost savings, yes, Linux can cost more money than it saves when the transition is not carefully planned and executed. Part of the reason for that is the large number of people who "make Linux harder than it is", as Roblimo, IIRC, pointed out. There is a variety of extremely simple graphical e-mail clients. Konqueror or Mozilla are both web browsers that can be used by almost anyone (whereas Konqueror can be set up easily by anyone with half a clue to look and act like IE). It's exactly the Internet client problems that are mostly solved on the desktop. Don't invent problems that do not exist. Surely you could set up mutt and procmail on a library computer, but then don't be surprised if people point and laugh.

But cost savings are not the main reason to move to Linux. The main reason are the long-term benefits of source code openness, which includes easy expandability, which is a major plus, because many additions by anyone from government agencies to corporations will be returned into the pool of open source software, to the benefit of all -- the more open-source software (GPL) is used, the more powerful this effect becomes (and there's the obvious "given enough eyes .." security/stability advantage, which also increases exponentially). Also, schools and libraries will not have to deal with unmanageable obsolescence cycles which are deliberately created by the Wintel duopoly. OSS will make computers better, more easy-to-use and cheaper. You should support those trying to make that difference, or become one of them.

Sorry, but

[madenosine]

It does not seem that many people have realised the fact that this man is a troll; the story is fake just look at his posting history. Christ...is it really that hard to see? I must say, however, that it is a good and pretty funny one.