OOXML: Go To Hell!
Demonstration against OOXML, originally uploaded by Martin Bekkelund.
It is a day after the Go Open conference in Oslo and I am still holed up in a hotel nearby. Blearily stumbling down to breakfast, I was confronted with a mix of lukewarm meatballs, easy listening radio — both of which are common enough to encounter in [...]
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20000 km, $7000, 7 days and 4 tons of CO2
… or, "Making Event Attendance Count"
Late last year, I gave a keynote at paired Finnish conferences MindTrek and OpenMind. While the events were well worth attending, afterwards I spent a few bleak hours thinking about the actual costs of my attendance. If I had left Canada just for these events (which, thankfully, I [...]
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Conference Report: OpenMind & MindTrek 2007
OpenMind 2007 and MindTrek 2007 were excellent mid-sized (400+ participants) tech events that brought together a great mix of people - academics, working developers, activists, senior IT management, public servants, industry veterans, innovators and even pirates [0].
Some presentations were lackluster, but the informal discussions were awesome. There [...]
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OpenMind 2007: Public Sector Benefits from Open Source
Carlos Montero-Luque takes the stage again, presenting a simple overview of how some governments are using Open Source and Open Standards, and the results that they are getting.
I fear that in rushing to get my notes from the other presentation online, I've missed part of this presentation.
As with Tommi, Carlos' slides contain the meat of [...]
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OpenMind 2007: Open Source and Standards in the Finnish Public Sector
Lunch has ended, and - after chatting a bit past the start of the sessions with Fredrik Syversen from IKT Norge, Mats Östling from the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions and Hendrik from a company name that I can't currently recall, I've come in late for the Open Source and Standards in the [...]
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OpenMind 2007: Monty on the Future (and Past) of Databases
After a break, Tommi Mikkonen of the Tampere University of Technology introduces Monty Widenius (who is, as most readers of this blog will know is one of the founders of MySQL AB)
Monty takes the stage wearing a suit - a nice suit - something I don't recall having seen before.
He starts with an overview [...]
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OpenMind 2007: Standardization, Industry-Community Cooperations and Mobile Linux
After Carlos, Nils Faerber from LiPS (a Linux telephony consortium that includes telephony operators, hardware vendors and software vendors) takes the stage.
Nils looks much more like we image an Open Source developer to look - more like a character from User Friendly than a character from Dilbert.
He gives a high-level overview of the current state [...]
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Free as in Independent: Norway's Progressive Stance on Free Software and Open Source
In a few hours Heidi Grande Røys, the surprising Norwegian Minister of Government Administration and Reform, will be in the city of Drammen to launch the first of what will be several national centres of expertise for Free Software and Open Source.
This first centre is meant to provide public bodies - especially Norwegian municipalities - [...]
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Extremadura Switching to Free Software
Interesting news via Rodrigo Moya:
All the computers of the Junta of Extremadura (goverment state of Spain) will be running free software within a year. This project makes the Regional Government the first Public Administration to adopt standards upheld by international organizations, that favour 'technological innovation and the reduction of user dependency.
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Tags: Free Software, Standards, Uncategorized
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