[LINK] NOIE to host Linux hoedown

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

NOIE to host Linux hoedown
By James Riley, iTnews 
Tuesday, 24 September 2002
http://www.itnews.com.au/story.cfm?ID=10869

Growing demand from government CIO's for critical Linux information has
prompted Australia's peak IT advisory body to step in with plans to conduct
a government sector Linux seminar by the end of the year.

The National Office of the Information Economy (NOIE) will invite
departmental CIO's and chief technology officers to attend an in-depth
enterprise Linux briefing.

NOIE business strategy branch general manager Steve Alford said the office
was designing a speaker program to address both the open source movement
generally and the Linux operating system in response strong demand from
public sector IT managers.

Alford said the seminar would be kept intimate, with only the most senior
of Federal government CIO's and CTO's expected to attend.

Alford said the NOIE organisers had held discussions with the Australian
Unix Users Group (AUUG), with research analysts Gartner, and with IBM over
a possible speaker program.

NOIE was particularly keen that IBM be involved in the program because of
its involvement in the two large Federal Government Linux pilot programs -
at Veterans Affairs and Centrelink.

Alford said NOIE hoped the seminar would include a presentation on the
preliminary findings of the Veterans Affairs and CentreLink projects, given
they are the only government Linux projects to have been publicly
announced.

NOIE expects that the Linux and open source seminar will be the first of
several, with at least one other expected by the middle of next year.

Given Linux was "relatively new" as an enterprise platform - and that there
was a dearth of information about large Linux implementations in the public
sector globally - Alford said that presentation information would need to
be updated.

He said the event was designed to be vendor neutral. Vendor representatives
would be allowed to attend, but the programming of the event would be kept
entirely within NOIE control.

-- 
There is only one satisfying way to boot a computer.
--J.H.Goldfuss

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd@austarmetro.com.au
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