[Wikimediaau-l] A contact of interest

Fri Jun 23 09:46:26 UTC 2006

So, I guess I'll take that resounding response as, "Ask him whatever
you want"..............?????????????

Brianna

On 21/06/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> This evening I went to the ACS' "branch forum" on open source
> licenses. One of the speakers was Con Zymaris (blog:
> http://white.cyber.com.au/conz/blog/ ), a very enthusiastic and
> experienced supporter of open-source. He's the convenor of Open Source
> Victoria (http://www.osv.org.au/ ), a govt group, and I think a
> co-founder of Open Source Industry Australia ( http://www.osia.net.au/
> ) which is an industry body. Towards the end of the forum Wikipedia
> came up, which of course pricked my ears. :) He mentioned
> interestingly that one of his friends has en.wp on a CD (no images)
> and he gives copies to schools!
>
> Afterwards I managed to bend his ear for about 20 minutes or so and
> talked mostly about WMA. He mentioned the need for two types of people
> in getting something like this going: one, your full-steam-ahead
> undampable-enthusiasts who drag (and enthuse) everyone else along, to
> get things done; and two, your realistic types who can temper such
> wild tendencies into forms acceptable to tax departments and similar
> niceties.
>
> Anyway I mentioned we are still trying to find the right structure etc
> and he said if I email him he will pass it on to some people who have
> experience setting up similar things and could maybe help us out.
> Obviously this would be great, so I thought I would check and see how
> our Organisational group has been going...?
>
> cheers,
> Brianna
>
> PS. http://www.osv.org.au/index.cgi?tid=14 even specifically mentions
> creating a wiki as suitable for Grade 7-12 kids & this website has a
> PDF of suitable applications for different grade levels (Nath, you
> might be interested).
>
> He mentioned that he had tried to convince the Education dept (not
> sure which one?) to switch to OSS for a long time, with no success so
> far, and their response is that they are afraid of "upsetting
> Microsoft". He suggested to them that next time, instead of just
> taking whatever MS offers, they should instead demand that MS pay THEM
> $28m a year to use their products, otherwise they would switch to
> something else. Can you imagine... how great that would be. :) MS
> would probably do it too (lose the monopoly to train all those young
> minds...?).
>