April Melbourne Meeting

Submitted on Wed, 30/04/2008 - 10:47am

These notes were taken by Hamish Taylor during informal discussion at the Melbourne OSIA meeting held on Thu 17 April 2008, in the Innovation@257 centre, Collins St, Melbourne CBD.

  • Suggestions to investigate international affiliations
  • Laptops in schools: decided through a grant system, administered by individual schools
  • OOXML (fiasco...), Standards Australia: Jeff Waugh went as OSIA representative to OOXML meeting. Standards Aust abstained in the vote, even though it appeared that 90% of the reps wanted to vote "no"
  • Jason: awareness of FOSS. NSW gov't 41,000 installs of OOo. There are lots of niche organisations (incl LUV, MLUG, etc). OSIA to become umbrella org? Coordinate events, esp with interstate orgs and raising awareness of FOSS (promotion)
  • White papers good, but media releases are important. Sydneysiders (esp Waugh Partners!) getting good results
  • Chatting about getting other people involved in the FOSS process: non-coders
  • Suggestion about needing more FOSS Project Managers
  • Open Standards discussion

Following the discussion Kevin Littlejohn of Obsidian Consulting presented

"Growing your Business"

Starting out on your own as a consultant, and building that into a small business, is a tough task - but what happens once you start hiring employees and growing larger? This talk examines one company's growth to 12 employees over the last 8 years. This isn't the gospel on how to run a business, but many of the issues we've faced will be common across IT companies generally.