Re: Public administrations

[Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

One thing to note.  In the U.S. it's possible to go speak to your
congressman in person and talk about GNOME.  Give him a GNOME livecd
tell him to give it to his staff to try out at home.  It might work that
way.

sri

On Fri, 2004-11-05 at 17:03 +0100, Claus Schwarm wrote:
> Thanks, Sebastian, for the feedback. :)
> 
> Germany seems to have similarities to your description, but there are
> also differences. The open-government.org efforts, I described
> in the previous mail, centers around a system administrator for a single
> and rather small town. But he deployed Linux two years ago. Munich is
> another example for the organization here.
> 
> Another example is a developer who helped on developing gnome-apps.org:
> He lives in Jamaica and wrote a paper about the situation of the DSL
> connections in his country after the last hurricane. Due to that paper
> he got invited by government agencies to discuss the issue.
> 
> What I'm trying to say: There are lots of smaller countries in the
> world, they are not as regulated as the U.S., and sometimes
> the ways to governments can be quite short.
> 
> But your information seems to confirm what I already thought: It's
> highly unlikely to find somebody to talk to, when you're from GNOME.
> Those that do decide these issues simply never heard of us (yet).
> 
> Also, as you already wrote, public administration will likely listen to
> a system integration business like IBM, RedHat, Sun, etc. When they say,
> GNOME's not the right decision for a public deployment, we're out of the
> game.
> 
> But that's not the complete story. 
> 
> We can do something: We can organize collaboration between Open
> Source coders and potential users to get a solution going, and the
> solution can be integrated into the desktop. That's the usual vertical
> integration strategy of Microsoft (Office protecting Windows, Outlook
> protecting its server).
> 
> We can also organize collaboration among users (i.e. interested persons
> in public admninistration) to share experiences. That'll make the brand
> GNOME more known among them, and system integrators will listen if
> potential users requested GNOME because they tested it at home, and
> shared Ubuntu or Fedora among their colleagues.
> 
> 
> Regards, 
> 
> Claus