Re: So, what's next?

[conrad]

		  Yes, I agree that we need to have a programme for OSSG activities, that it should be based on the goals that we want OSSG to achieve, and that we should select speakers based on those topics, rather than be driven by "speaker availability".

I rather suspect that to promote the adoption of free/open source software solutions -- or at least, to promote the consideration of them as an option beside proprietary solutions -- what would go down best with our putative audiences is case studies or "war stories" that come from scenarios with which they can fairly easily identify.

I guess every IT manager's nightmares orbit around issues of meeting expectations, configuration, management and support. So why don't we have a meeting in the fairly near future that takes one or more case studies which will deal with these topics?  And I suggest that, rather than looking at a rather specialised business activity such as Sony's engineering and development, we take something as generic as possible -- the use of Open Source office productivity suites, like OpenOffice and StarOffice.

I further suggest that we look for case studies in the Public Service sector, and the one that comes to mind is Bristol City Council's migration to Open Source on the desktop.  Indeed, we could hold the meeting in Bristol, which is Not London, close to BCS Swindon. Maybe Andrew Nicolson could be our SOE operative on the ground?

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Paul suggested that we should have portions of these discussions in various workgroups.  For example, discuss the aims and objectives in one, then the activities in another... I confess that finding my way around the OSSG space is already sufficiently cognitively challenging, and logical as his suggestion may be, I'd rather not have to go poking my cursor into one corner after another to find where the discussion has moved on to...  

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On the subject of budgets, please remember that the pot of money the BCS has for sharing out between Specialist Groups is finite, and also that some of the other SGs don't actually tap into that money because they have found ways of generating income on their own, which may in the long run be appreciated by SG Exec.  On the other hand, also remember that there is another pot of money called the Designated Fund, which is quite large and relatively under-used, and which exists to fund one-off projects.

Conrad