[Gllug] Open Source lobbying meeting - UKUUG London Thurs 19th

[Alain Williams]

You may be interested in a meeting next Thursday evening in London.
Here is the original announcement plus my opening it out.

Do turn up if you can and see if we can make a real difference.

Leslie said:


MEMBERS MEETING TO DISCUSS UKUUG INVOLVEMENT IN LOBBYING

All members are invited to an informal meeting on

THURSDAY 19 OCTOBER

18:30 - 20:30

Tudor Room, The Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, London WC1B 5BB

The purposes of the meeting are
     1. To continue the discussion following the AGM prompted by Leslie
Fletcher's presentation, to allow members more time to give their views
and ask questions on what has been done so far and what is planned.
An extended version of the presentation is available at

http://www.ukuug.org/events/agm2006/leslie.pdf

     2. To confirm, or not, the impression that members want UKUUG to be
involved in lobbying and advocacy and are happy to see their membership
dues spent in support of it.  Council is looking to decide within the
next month whether this is an appropriate activity for UKUUG to continue
with so members views are crucial

     3. To discuss a possible role for UKUUG in coordinating the
response of the UK FLOSS community to UK and EU funding, promotional and
marketing opportunities.  There is concern that this is being
compromised by dissension and disorganisation within the community.

Further information can be obtained from Leslie.Fletcher at ukuug.org
--
Leslie Fletcher <Leslie.Fletcher at ukuug.org>



I added:

I wonder if we should broaden the topic slightly to look at how the open source community
is failing to make inroads into government generally. Also as was pointed out in a recent
email from Eddie (reposted by Phil) the free s/ware community is not getting access to
some of the large pots of EU money that is being eaten by the large/proprietary vendors;
if we could tap into some of that we could make great progress.

There are several parts to the problem:

1) FL?OSS programmers tend to be individuals who don't work well in large groups.
   Herding cats is a phrase that springs to mind.

2) FL?OSS people tend to distrust/dislike marketing people, yet is it marketing
   that is needed to get our stuff out there.

3) FL?OSS projects don't generate large sums of money so people cannot be employed to
   ensure that it is widely used: ie we don't employ the marketing people and the
   admin/secretarial/... types who fill in EU grant application forms, etc.

4) FL?OSS is great for infrastructure and has some good end user visible applications
   (eg: openofice; firefox) but has big holes (eg: a mapi connector that would allow
   a FL?OSS groupware server talk to unmodified MS Outlook clients; a decent personal
   finance package [gnucash has some way to go]). These 'hard' items need funding,
   where do we get it from ?

OK: you get the drift of where I am coming from.

I would like to broaden the discussion on 19th to talk about this and related issues.

I believe that this is of interest to UKUUG members and to the benefit of many of them.
I am willing to put some time in to help drive this forwards ... if others will join in to help.

I see that a working group or two might be one result of next Thursday's meeting.


-- 
Alain Williams
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd.
Linux Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256  http://www.phcomp.co.uk/

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