[LINK] Consultancy to Review FOSS in Clth Agencies

[Tom Worthington]

At 04:22 PM 10/7/2006, Roger Clarke wrote:
>This may interest some linkers. ... Free and Open Source Software 
>Survey of Australian Government Agencies  ...

The Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software 
(ASK-OSS), already have a government grant to survey FOSS in the 
higher education sector <http://www.ask-oss.mq.edu.au/>. So they 
would be the logical choice to do it for the government sector.

>It's important that this be performed by a consultancy with no axe 
>to grind ...

Where do you get an impartial FOSS expert?

>... But will it deliver depth?

Breadth might be useful first. It would be useful to have a catalog 
of FOSS in Government; the first requirement from AGIMO: (a) A view 
of what agencies are using open source and in what applications.

>[Although this will probably go to an established consultancy group 
>(not necessarily a large one, because price matters to the Clth) ...

The usual way consultants do this is by sending someone around to 
interview people in agencies, which is expensive (the ASK-OSS visited 
ANU and talked to an e-publishing project). Perhaps a small group of 
consultants could instead do an automated search on the Internet to 
look for FOSS in agencies and the follow that up with an on-line questionnaire.

Perhaps someone could break new ground by offering to do it as an 
open access consultancy. The results would be provided free online. 
Might even be possible to it at a reduced rate or even for free, by 
putting ads on the report on-line (should be a topic of interest to a 
lot of advertisers).



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Director, ACS Communications Tech Board   http://www.acs.org.au/ctb/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml