Maricopa County mtg report

[Trent Shipley]

On Tuesday 09 July 2002 04:14, you wrote:

> > Maricopa County shares top billing with Fairfax County, .va.us, for some
> > gov't efficiency award related to the IT group.
>
> Lin seemed to be very proud of this award. We need to find out what the
> award was and why Maricopa County was chosen. It should give us some civic
> pride that the county won an award they consider prestigious.
>

This is important.  Maricopa County's IT management values efficiency.  
Freeware will be used on a tactical basis when (or rather *if*) it advances 
efficiency.  For Linux this means ad hoc solutions to customer service 
demands.  Usually in the form of old-box + Linux as a single-use dedicated 
appliance  (print server, fax server, free Postgresql database, etc).

NBB!  The county doesn't have *nix tallent at the level that deals with these 
sorts of customer service requests.  This is a point where PLUG volunteer 
consultants could help.  The ideal way to approach this is to have IT 
management let the appropriate low-level managers know that PLUG is a 
resource for *fast* *efficient* roll outs of one-off tactical solutions.


> > Maricopa County is considering using XML as a data storage format and as
> > a data presentation format, e.g. XML to the web browser.
>
> This is important. It is quite possibly where we need to concentrate our
> efforts with the Maricapa County CIO's office.

It is one point of mutual interest.  For County IT XML promises more of that 
highly valued interoperability plus forward compatibility during upgrades.  
For us XML provides open, self-documenting formats. 


> > The overriding architecture principle guiding Maricopa County's IT plans
> > is: it's more important that the pieces work together than it is to have
> > the best individual pieces.
>
> This is a possible opening for us. It only works well together as long as
> Microsoft decides it's in Microsoft's favor to work well together. Free
> Software can fixed to continue working well together. Free Software doesn't
> use the 'embrace and extend' attack to not work well with others.

No.  Microsoft will always want MS products to play nice together.  


> > Maricopa County has to hook up data internally and with other gov't
> > bodies, e.g state and fed ( FBI ).
>
> This is an important aspect to the overall campaign. We need to remind
> every group that their requirements for Microsoft are furthering the
> monopoly. The monopoly is not in the best interests of the citizens of this
> country or in the best interests of our economy.

THAT is very debatable.  Maricopa IT's position is implicitly that the MS 
monopoly is a *good* thing.  The resulting obligitory standard coupled with 
ease of use (deskilling) more than offsets the marginal cost of any monopoly 
rents extracted by MS.


> > Maricopa county plans on a 3 year life-cycle for desktops and 2 years for
> > laptops. That doesn't imply machines have to be replaced, though. Paul
> > mentioned current reasons for replacing machines include features like
> > wake on LAN cards to allow remote updates at night when the worker isn't
> > using the desktop.
>
> They own the boxen at the end of the rotation, so they should be getting
> plenty of 'older' boxen that will work quite mightily with GNU/Linux.

Yep.  If there is enough work for all those senile boxen.


> > Maricopa County wants to put it's efforts into things like business
> > processes, business design, horizontal workflow, and webs ( MC-speak for
> > intranet ).
>
> We need to find out what these items are and evaluate where we can help.

This is where AZOTO (?) can help.  Providing free (or low cost) consulting is 
*not* lobying.  It is within the ambit of the NPO's mission.  More 
importantly it gives the County a partner that is less organizationally 
amorphous than PLUG.  


> > Maricapa County has no GNU/Linux in production. During the Q and A period
> > they mentioned some internal experiments being lead by their 'Linux
> > champion', Derek Neighbors. Paul mentioned an internal web request system
> > and some file/print sharing experiments. There are no immediate plans to
> > deploy GNU/Linux to production, but the web request system looks like a
> > good candidate for the function it's supposed to implement.
>
> We should seek to get updates on how these experiments are going. We might
> be able to offer some assistance.

Agreed.

> > Paul said there are thousands of potential attack attempts per day on
> > Maricopa County systems. Lin said the county has never been cracked or
> > had a major virus infection. He mentioned that the county goes to great
> > effort to prevent viruses.
>
> How much are they spending on virus protection?

Why would it matter?  Even with *NIX, you still need virus protection.


> > The response was that the only allowed 'archival' formats are paper and
> > microfiche, so electronic data format is irrelevant. Maricopa County has
> > many, many paper records stored by Iron Mountain.
>
> They would be very happy if we could convince the state to allow electronic
> formats for archival. This is something we should push regardless of the
> other issues. I wonder how much the paper storage is costing the state. Is
> it just increasing every year as more papers get locked into the vaults?
> What is storage cost for all that paperwork?

NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.  

I did an internship at an archive.  There is no way around the fact that 
critical documents must be stored in readilly accessible, human readable, 
analog formats.

What is possible is to get a re-audit of what documents are classified as 
"critical".  A lot of documents will be purged after seven years (or other 
small number) the risk of storing these ephemeral records only in machine 
readable digital formats is low.  Arguably, ephemeral documents (say less 
than 10 years of retention time) *should* be stored electronically.