eGovOS 3 Announced

A reader writes:"German Minister Otto Schily and at least 2 other ministers will be keynoting at EGOVOS 3: Open Standards and Libre Software in Government conference in Paris, France on November 24-26, 2003. EGOVOS 3 will bring together the largest number ever of high level government officials working in Open Source and Free Software. In addition to the national ministers, 15 senior politicians, government IT officials and representatives from the European Commission, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, Panama and the US will being making presentations." You will find general registration is open - free, but limited seating. Additionally, press registration is open as well. I normally don't post many conference announcements, but this one should have significant impact on governmental decisions around Free/Libre/Open/Whatever Software.

Comments

Open goverment from the people who know...

[MosesJones]

Previous sponsors of EGOVOS have included UNDP, the World Bank, IBM, Oracle, Sun, Red Hat, and Dell as well as government associations and universities.

Remember folks, when people talk about Open Software and standards they are not talking about employing a bunch of bearded hackers with l33t Linux skills. They are talking about hiring the big boys, who in many ways just happen to be supporting this movement because it fits their business and selling models.

This is great to see, but lets not pretend that it isn't the big boys who are making sure the goverments play with Open Source toys.

Open Standards

[ultraw]

I hope they put quite some stress and effort in the "open standard" parts. I don't care which software is being used. The government will have a good reason why they take it (and I hope this reason is a mixture of cost, support, easy to use, scalability, lifetime,...). If it possible using Open Source, why not. If a product and support from a company are better, sorry, but you have to be reasonable (and that is MY tax money they are using :)).

As long as the documents and data that are stored in the systems are stored in an easy accessible format, and not some closed standard, I'm a happy person. If the government want to switch software, they should be able to do so with little problems.

Also, it's quite disturbing to notice (again and again) that you can download all the documents you need do something administrative, but find out that it is in the latest crappy MS DOC format which is unreadable/badly formatted by my word processor... I even got auto-reply mail with only a doc file attached.

You get it wrong...

[imsabbel]

Politicans dont have any opinion on software patents here in Germany. But there is high unemployment and the (mostly american) software companies are making claims that software patens will help economy, create jobs, enlarge you penis,... (you get the idea).

So Politicians are in a situation where press and opposition grabs these claims and claim they arent doing anything against recession.

Until now, most simply choose to support the patents because they heard only voices supporting them. But the latest protest seem to have changed some opinions.