Soccer girl (cc-by-sa 2.0)

During the last few weeks after the world cup, the idea grew up in me to run a parallel tournament to the football championship in Europe 2012 where the discipline is Free Software usage in Government. This idea sounds so much like work, and I have so many other more important things to do, that I forced myself to forget about it. Today was the first qualifying game for the Euro 2012 and I just decided to give it a try nevertheless. We will see how long I will stay on the ball 🙂

One of the first questions is: how do you measure the usage of Free Software and open standards in governments in a competitive way? It might be impossible to do this in a fair manner. But do soccer matches always come to a fair end?

Well, there are common rules that the participating countries declare to abide. We all can develop our own set of rules for our little tournament and I hope you will join!

So here is my set of rules which I hope to see mature with your help:

1. Since I am obviously the only one participating so far, my judgement will rule, if nobody else speaks up.
2. If somebody disagrees, I’m overruled.
3. If a third or more parties join, majority wins.
4. If even and a winner is required (only then), FSFE Fellow votes count double.
5. If still even. We’ll copy the result of the corresponding football game.
6. We’ll try to follow the soccer championship time table wherever possible.
7. These rules can be changed by consensus until the UEFA qualifing ends on Oct 11, 2011. After that date, we’ll stick to what we have by then.

Comments are welcome.