County Meeting

Am 09. Jul, 2002 schwätzte Robert Bushman so:

> By dedicating enormous resources (relative to
> their available resources) for very long periods
> of time. This is worthwhile if the bear has the
> highest ROI relative to other targets of
> opportunity.

We don't have those type of resources and we're trying to tackle a couple of
entities that are much larger than bears.

> Moreover, how important is Maricopa County as a
> migration target? Are there other targets that
> could provide a higher ROI?

There are. There are also possibly better ways to work with Maricopa County.

> Very agreed. I think this is what so firmly entrenches
> their position. Right now, Maricopa has hard numbers
> showing that their technology strategy, including their
> alliance with Microsoft, is working. I think that
> some of the assumptions that lead to those numbers
> are inaccurate, but I can't show hard numbers - yet.

That is one of the possible better approaches :).

> There are many targets of opportunity in Maricopa
> County - private, public, and individual. If we
> get the populace of Maricopa County up to 10%
> Linux deployed on the desktop, with a 90% success
> rate, will Maricopa be able to defend it's
> Microsoft-centricity?

Excellent point. Brings us back to community outreach. InstallFests and
AZOTO projects are excellent showcases to demonstrate that we have people in
the county who use GNU/Linux. So are bodies at the meetings. The quality of
our presentations will help, e.g. sign up to do a good talk and help us get
the classes going.

> To me, it's increasing the deployment of open technology.
> MPAA and RIAA are trying to outlaw general purpose
> computing. Microsoft is trying to outlaw Free software.
> Increasing the deployment of Linux is, IMO, one of the
> few ways we can stop these efforts. Stopping these
> efforts is imperative.

Deployment helps, but we need the public to understand how important it is
to demand their freedoms. My grandma doesn't understand all the technical
issues, but she understands freedom and she knows that a monopoly is the
antithesis to freedom for the consumer. She was there.

> I want to make Install Fest large and self-sustaining.

Yes. I want them to include lots of demos and presentations. Actually, I
want regular mini-conferences that have space for an InstallFest as one of
the activities.

> RE: Long Term:
> If we could get State to accept an electronic format for
> long term storage, we could specify an open format. We

Open formats with publicly available specifications are essential to using
electronic format for storage longer than a couple of years.

On the radio today they mentioned that the SEC permanently lost lots of data
in the Sept 11 crashings. Dead tree format isn't appropriate for storage at
multiple locations to avoid problems like that.

> would have to solve the issue of future-proofing the
> media. If you can solve the, "leave it sitting in a cave
> for 1000 years, then read it" problem, it would be a
> major first step.

The solution is a policy that requires copying it every few years to new
media rather than just letting it sit.

> RE: Short Term:
> Bill Lindley brought this up. County sounded pretty firm
> in it's belief that for transient documents, proprietary
> formats are fine. We pressed them on it, and they didn't
> budge.

Actually, I think they want to consider XML. They just don't want to budge
on the tools they use for reading/writing the format.

> Firewalls, fax servers, static document servers, print
> servers, routers, - virtually any non-GUI process that
> is not processor intensive.

These are places where we can make a good case that any government entity is
wasting taxpayer dollars if they're not using a Free Software solution.
Print and fax servers should only be Free Software. Static document servers
and firewalls can have some issues, but pointing out that security is
non-existent if you can't audit the mechanism should allow us to show
firewalls should be Free Software. There are commercial products built on
Free Software that offer full support, GUI tools, etc.

ciao,

der.hans
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