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Re: [LUG] Potential presentation to TDA

 

On 20 March 2010 12:32, tom brough <tombrough@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
After suffering 10+ years of working for Torbay Council's IT department.
I have been informed after numerous presentations about open standards /
open source and the current central government thinking on IT strategy,
that the strategy in Torbay Council will be to continue to provide
Microsoft / Microsoft based solutions for everything "Possible".

To quote:

"If I had my way, everything would be Microsoft".

It would seem that the long term strategy is "business as usual" despite
government policy favouring Open Source "Where ever possible", which
unfortunately my director of IT interprets as "Not at all possible".

While I will not give up fighting, I have decided that I want to change
tactics and address the business community in Torbay through the Torbay
Development Agency (TDA). I know that some (in high places) will see
this as a conflict of interests, so I intend to present my presentation
materials to them prior to doing the presentation. Clearly this means
that I can not be critical either directly or indirectly of council
policy, but since this is NOT my intention there should be no issues.
Ultimately if they disapprove of my presentation, I will have to make
the decision to go ahead "and be damned" or search for a "proxy" to
deliver the presentation....


I figure that may sets of eyes are better than one so I am seeking the
communities help in finding research papers to back up my presentation.
The presentation will be on the lines of how to stimulate economic
growth through the adoption and use of Open Source in the Torbay
Business Community.

This equally applies in other areas of Devon and Cornwall (and beyond)
but this is the focus of my presentation and all will be welcome to
copy, amend and reuse the resulting resources.

Some Themes are:

Open Standards - importance of and leverage for buisness.
Open Source awareness - strengths and weaknesses.
Examples of open source adoptions in Community / Business.
Adoption strategies - analysis of strengths and weaknesses.
Encourage local training programmes to support skill levels needed to
support open source adoption in business.

I am generating a kdissert mind map at the moment which will hopefully
feed into a presentation to the TDA. Ultimately I would like to be able
to provide an open resource set that could be used to duplicate
presentations tailored for other business interest groups.

What I am really stuck with is finding articles (preferably with
referenced statistics) that show how adoption of Open Source in
economically deprived areas has stimulated the economy. This is probably
because the real savings / costs are difficult to quantify to any degree
of accuracy that researchers are confident to publish.

However, if anyone comes across a specific reference to this (with
stats) could they please post to me or the group email address, I would
be most appreciative .....

Any other constructive suggestions  would be welcomed.

In the meantime I will be getting back to my quest.... ;-)

Thanks

Tom.

I have some contacts in the leisure industry in the Bay. I would have put some friends of mine on Linux but, they use a very popular bespoke app called Caterbook which is Windows based. However, it probably work OK on VirtualBox. Perhaps it could be worth checking with the Caterbook guy if he could do a Linux version?

Guesthouses / small hotels are really struggling in the recession and would, I think be interested in anything that would save them money. 

Viv



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