OSIG and OpenSource.wa.gov.au

OSIG is depend­ing on who you talk to (or my mood) the Online Ser­vices Interest Group or the Online Ser­vices In Gov­ern­ment Group. It was set up a few years ago by Fiona Reilly and Sam Smith for those who worked in online ser­vices in the WA Gov­ern­ment the chance to net­work and see present­a­tions tar­geted at those work­ing in the WA Gov­ern­ment. Unfor­tu­nately Fiona and Sam ended up at far ends of the world, Ire­land and Mid­land, respect­ively and OSIG cease to exist except as a mail­ing list for jobs in the online and IT sec­tor of the WA Government.

A couple of months ago Russ Weakley and Peter Firminger of the Web Stand­ards Group hap­pen to be in town and I con­vinced them to do a present­a­tion Intro­duc­tion to Web Stand­ards to OSIG. At rel­at­ively short notice and with little mar­ket­ing other than the OSIG and WSG mail­ing lists, we man­aged to get 60 people to attend. The audi­ence was a broad cross sec­tion of people involved provid­ing online ser­vices in the West Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment: man­agers, developers, design­ers, con­tent pro­du­cers and people who had mul­tiple roles, as well as a small num­ber of lec­tur­ers, stu­dents and private enter­prise people. The feed­back forms had an 80% return rate and all was positive.

Fiona who had recently returned from Ire­land, must of felt sorry for me or was get­ting pestered by her old con­tacts for more events, so on Wed­nes­day OSIG had it’s second event of the new sea­son, a present­a­tion by Kevin Rus­sell of the Open Source Centre.

The audi­ence was not the typ­ical OSIG crowd, more people that keep the com­puters run­ning than the online ser­vice deliv­ery folk from the pre­vi­ous meet­ing. The present­a­tion was an a simple intro­duc­tion to the open source, no sur­prises for me there. What sur­prised me was the philoshopy behind the open source centre which is part of DOIR (Depart­ment of Industry and Resources). Simply put, it is to encour­age the use of open source soft­ware in both gov­ern­ment and private sec­tor because using open source you are more likely to use local com­pan­ies and people to configure/develop/maintain the soft­ware. And a strong local com­puter soft­ware sup­port industry is good for the economy.

What can the Open Source Centre do for you, well if you are a West­ern Aus­tralian (Gov­ern­ment agency, busi­ness or private indi­vidual) and con­tem­plat­ing new soft­ware the Open Source Centre can provide you with advice on what open source soft­ware is avail­able, provide recom­mend­a­tions, demon­strate soft­ware and put you in con­tact with people to configure/develop/maintain.

What can OSIG do for you, well if are look­ing for a job in online or IT sec­tor of the WA Gov­ern­ment the mail­ing list is prob­ably the easi­est way to find out what is avail­able. If you are work in the online or IT sec­tor of the WA Gov­ern­ment or just inter­ested in find­ing out about forth com­ing events and with a little bit of luck they should be some over the next few months, sub­scribe to the mail­ing list.

Tagged OSIG Open­Source

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 12th, 2005 at 7:42 am and is filed under OSIG . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.