IPA Japan Representatives

I just returned from Matsue, Japan, also known famously as “Ruby City” after the programming language whose inventor lives there.

During my stay there I provided the keynote for a Shimane University-sponsored seminar on Open Source Software, Industry and Academic collaboration.  It was an honor to represent some of the institutions and groups in Oregon, the successes and challenges we’ve faced in using, promoting, developing and supporting a full open eco-system in our somewhat unique state.  Key to my message and encouragement to participants from all sectors of their region was this; if you want to demonstrate the value of open source to non-technical constituencies, identify and collaborate on a project with clear public benefit.

One of the panelists was Mr. Hatta from Japan’s Information-Technology Promotion Agency’s (IPA).  He told me later he changed his presentation as I spoke, struck by the proposition of public benefit projects.  I’ll ask for his presentation and share it here soon.

His wrap-up recommendation: create a public benefit project and the suggestion that project might be an Open Source Election system,  apparently an idea with universal appeal/compelling need.

I’ll come back soon to sharing more about my travels to Matsue City, their impressive open source software initiative, the investment their government has made, and the outstanding collaboration between the university, industry and public sectors.

I’d also be remiss in my public benefit duties if I did not provide a final plug for the February 18th Open Source Digital Voting Foundation’s (OSDV.org)  “TrustTheVote” intro in Portland, Oregon (see prior post for agenda).  I’m looking forward to introducing them to my colleagues in Japan soon, and looking forward to hearing from Gregory Miller and John Sebes, the co-founders, even sooner.

TrustTheVote! intro in Portland, Oregon

Feb 18, 2009, 6:00 – 7:30 p.m.

CubeSpace, 622 SE Grand Ave, Portland

I’ve recently been asked to join as an adviser to the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation.  In my view, this is one of the most important open source projects around for the US system of democracy.  I was deeply impressed by their open standards specification,  public trust approach and the work they’ve done thus far – with little public fan fare – to establish the non-partisan initiative which has become known as “TrustTheVote!”.

Recognizing a large, active OSS community exists in Oregon, the OSDV is coming to Portland on February 18th to introduce their project.  Although the meeting content is designed for a technical audience, the project overview and progress-to-date would be of interest to many.

Here’s a description of the event.  You can also view details including a map to the event at Portland’s CubeSpace on Yahoo or Calagator.  If you’re in the area, hope to see you there!

TrustTheVote! intro in Portland, Oregon, Feb 18, 2009

Discover this imperative “public digital works project” of the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation. The OSDV Foundation is a Silicon Valley based public benefits corporation whose mission is to work to restore trust in how America votes through the design, development, and demonstration of open source digital voting technology.

Join us to learn details about the “TrustTheVote Project,” a well funded non-profit effort which has been under the radar for 2 years. The OSDV Foundation is now raising public awareness, and expanding efforts including a planned development center in Portland, Oregon.

Our guests are two executives of the Foundation including its Chief Technology Officer. Their presentation will:

• Introduce the project, its motivation, founding, and development efforts to date;
• Walk through the TrustTheVote technology road map and review major projects underway;
• Discuss development philosophies and approaches including experience-driven design and test-driven agile development;
• Review opportunities for systems architects, software developers, SDQA/test specialists, and user experience designers;
• Cover plans to expand the volunteer developer teams, future opportunities for senior members of technical staff, and opportunities for you to get involved.

Presenters:
Gregory Miller, Chief Development Officer
E. John Sebes, Chief Technology Officer

event on: Yahoo or Calagator

“I will talk about the Brazilian free software perspective and strategy.

We’ve been working with the principle of knowledge acquiring and management as strategy. Much more than with the principle of saving resources or simply comparing software prices. Our commitment is with our knowledge and our intelligence.

We are knowledge resourceful in our country and we are investing in the leading edge knowledge of how technology evolves and how this evolution impacts our information systems and the way they are built.

Our governments are heavy users of information systems. In fact we have one of the highest information systems dependency levels in the whole world. We ought to deal with multiple platforms both user and server sides. The best way for us to operate in such a scenario without become vendor-dependent is to adopt an approach that combines free software and standards.
Standards play a key role in our software development policy and free software provide us with mainstream tool to comply with those standards.

When we build free software based solutions we are promoting further knowledge and fostering our country’s building abilities. This is our relation with free software world and from this relation comes cooperation.

Free Software is as sustainable as more people cooperate sharing information and knowledge working for the same goal. Thus we are building permanent a free knowledge network in South America, Latin America, Europe, USA and whichever country that would be committed to share this will, including Africa and Oceania.

Our belief is that our knowledge grows solid and stronger as more and more people and nations players work together and more ability we will have to provide responses to our demanded needs. Through that way we will reach joint development among those players or derive development from others’ achievements. This is the more appropriate way to define free software and standards under our point of view.

Clearly we have expressive savings once we adopt free software and since it is possible to reuse open source software we are also able to accelerate our processes. But the essential part of our free software policy is the mankind ability to excel technology.

This excellence allows a non-dependent evolution process, since free software leverages all players at the topmost level of knowledge and technology with no industry driven lag or handicap but the possibility to choose their best options as good as “best” may get.

The develop nations in technology and those currently in development are all facing the same conditions to benefit from the mankind’s achievements and evolution. This is the underlying reason why we are working in Brazil for very strong adoption of free software in our “telecenters”, schools, health facilities as much as in the Brazilian e-gov as a whole.

Brazilian e-gov infrastructure is based in FOSS. This won’t forbid or refrain us to use propietary or closed software. But our government’s policy, our perspective, is to move further and further into free software world, free knowledge.

That is why is so important to take part in discussions like this. Knowing more people, users, developers we get acquainted to new solutions and partners, strengthening this win-win network.

I’d like to wish you a great GOSCON. I see this kind of dialogue and network building as of the very highest importance and look forward to hear great results from such meeting.
Have a good conference!”

Marcos Vinicius Ferreira Mazoni

My first Flick Pick of the Week is the Executive Panel on Open Document Formats. It may be a bit backwards to start with the closing panel, but this topic will change soon enough so we didn’t want to sit on it too long. In fact since the panel was taped, the OpenDocument Foundation, which made news by taking a position for a different format altogether, has retired as an entity.

Participants included Adobe’s James King; IBM’s Arnaud LeHors; Microsoft’s Jason Matusow; OpenDocument Foundation’s Paul “Buck” Martin; and Sun Microsystems’ Douglas Johnson. Thanks again to the panelists. (I’m sorry Jason has been swamped but the other four panelists were able take time to weigh in on questions that had been collected from the audience but not always fully answered during the limited time at the conference.)

The GOSCON site provides the slide set, video and an open discussion thread (the latter a first for the conference web site – we shall see.) Mo info mo betta; you be the judge.