Don Christie is more than the President of the NZOSS. He has been operating his Wellington based IT company, Catalyst IT for 12 years. In this NZ Herald article he describes the principles he founded his business on, and how the relationship between the open source community and commercial organisations such as his work. Catalyst are involved heavily with the public sector, but are also addressing the needs of educational institutions.

The New Zealand Open Source Society and Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Information Management today launched an IT vendor capability survey, as part of the Public Sector Remix project.

The Remix project involves a number of central, regional and local government agencies working together to trial free software for common desktop tasks such as document management, mail, calendar and browser-based information services.

InternetNZ and the Creative Freedom group have slammed a change of direction in the latest round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations which are seeking to cut off peoples Internet connections for copyright infringement. Earlier this year the Creative Freedom group promoted an Internet Blackout in support of repealing changes to the Copyright Act that have cut peoples connections if they commit copyright infringement.

The New Zealand Python User Group is promoting Python as a programming language ideal for introducing students to software development. The group claims Python is one of the closest programming language to the English language and is therefore very simple to learn. As evidence of the simplicity of Python they point to Otago University who have decided to teach Python as part of an introductory course to programming.

I attended a lecture last week by Professor Rowena Cullen of Victoria University, School of Information Management.

It was a very interesting talk where she spoke about the importance of a barriers to using and analysing information in the Health sector. She put IT investments in the context of health outcomes and used NZ and UK case studies to demonstrate how poor the returns on IT investment have been.

My own belief is that this complaint applies to a lot of IT spending across both the public and private sectors.

She finishes the paper with the following comments:

The public sector in New Zealand is looking at how public agencies around the world have adapted their procurement policies to get better value for the taxpayer. Many countries share the New Zealand Government’s priorities: improve public services, lift productivity, and manage costs.

To help achieve this, the Government’s procurement reform programme aims to deliver cost savings, build procurement capability and capacity, enhance New Zealand business participation in government procurement, and improve procurement governance.

The NZOSS is now a charitable society. Earlier in the year the NZOSS modified it's constitution in order to support it's application to gain charitable status. With those changes in place it was possible to move ahead with becoming a charitable society. A few days ago we received our registration documentation.

Clare Curran has been spending time listening and talking to a lot of people as she gets to grips with her ICT spokesperson portfolio. She picked Software Freedom Day (Wellington) to come very close to announcing a full on FOSS friendly policy from Labour.

Liberty, Linux and the gift economy.

NorthTec's CIS department has released its first newsletter (see attached). Many thanks to Dr. Albert van Aardt for bringing it to our attention. It is clear that Northtec is interested in teaching people about the fundamentals of computing.

Media Release

For immediate publication.

The public sector in New Zealand is following other public agencies around the world in looking for ways to reduce the cost of desktop computing.

The New Zealand Open Source Society today announced the launch of the Public Sector Remix project to demonstrate the viability of free open source software on public sector desktops.

A number of central, regional and local government agencies are working together to run trials using free software for common desktop tasks.