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Enlightened Self-Interest
Yesterday I gave a talk at an NOiV event (the NOiV is the Dutch government bureau leading Open Systems, Open Standards and Open Source adoption). You can find the schedule here where you’ll find I was the closing keynote speaker (warning: both sites in Dutch). I never got around to blogging this in advance, possibly because I assume readers of my blog aren’t IT managers at Dutch local councils. It’s quite interesting talking to people in this area, because they do have long-term societal responsibility — which is something that the four Freedoms of Free Software address — and yet at the same time are stuck with interoperability and transition questions from decades of proprietary software use. So I seized the opportunity to learn more about the tax office, libraries and the police and they way they operate their IT infrastructure and software selection process. On the whole it was a pretty successful day, and I was glad to hear from several folks that they appreciated my talk. I’ll probably end up at the NOiV again in September at one of their inspirational events. That’s enlightened self-interest on my part, too 🙂
[[ As an aside, I found www.ictkalender.nl today, which seems to have a pretty complete view of IT events in the Netherlands. I’d never heard of it before, nor have I checked if it actually lists all the Free Software events in the Netherlands or any of the non-commercial offerings, but it seems fairly complete. There’s a DrupalJam going on tomorrow, for instance. ]]