presentatie

Zoals een aantal van jullie vast al bekend zal zijn heb ik me de afgelopen maanden in het kader van het afstuderen (opleiding Informatica aan de Haagse Hogeschool) bezig gehouden met het voor Gendo ontwikkelen van een demonstratietool om de verscheidene voordelen van het OpenDocument Format over te brengen aan beslissers op het gebied van onder andere documentaire informatievoorziening.

Gisteren was de afstudeerzitting en laat ik beginnen met het goede nieuws, ik ben geslaagd!

Onder het mom van "Practice What You Preach" zijn alle gebruikte plaatjes en de presentatie zelf gelicenseerd onder een Creative Commons licentie (by/by-sa). Daarnaast zijn grote delen van de tekst die bij de presentatie hoort gebaseerd op  het artikel open standaarden dat te vinden is op de Livre wiki, ook deze tekst is gelicenseerd onder een Creative Commons licentie.

ODP | PDF

Had a lovely evening dinner yesterday with the members of the Kensington Rotary at the Regency Hotel in South Kensington. On invitation of one of their members I gave a table-speech version (no beamers or other crutches) of the type of talk I often do as a lead-in to scenario planning workshops. Had a good dialogue afterwards on the use of technology and its meaning to society. That is what Rotary is about after all; service above self.

For those members who could not make it: an example of the type of talk I did (somewhat more focused on the technology side of things) can be found here. The article about the Oyster card being hacked I was so furiously typing on my mobile phone during their charity concert on the 18th of last month can be found here.

On Saturday May 31st Gendo presented its experience on changing national policy on open standards and opensource at LinuxTag 2008. The slides are here in ODF and PDF. LinuxTag is Europe's largest opensource conference with over 11.000 participants from 31 countries. Doing a talk there was a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to next year.

Linux Magazine Germany has a writeup of the talk here. and reported on the Dutch opensource policyplan earlier this year. The presentation was not recorded but an earlier (similar) presentation was taped last december at the CCC congess, also in Berlin.

Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Kelvin, Einstein, Curie and Borh laid the foundations of modern civilisation. The greater understanding of the universe around us and new technological abilities lifted us out of the middle ages and gave us unimaginable powers over our environment. Physics research yielded many practical results even in Newton's time (such as insight into orbital mechanics - very useful for aiming ships' cannons) and even when the cost went up astronomically during the 1940's the benefits were still so large (winning the war) that nation-states would hand out the required means to do experimentation.

Just did a talk about my adventures in policy-land changing Dutch national policy on opensource and open standards. For a summary of the talk and video read on...

On January 1st, 2002 I tried to use the website of the Dutch national railway (www.ns.nl) using Linux. The site refused me access, it was IE-only. This sparked a conversation with members of parliament about the need for open standards. Over a five year period I progressed from talking to opposition-MP's to meeting the economics minister directly and was able to significantly influence national policy despite total lack of funding or any specific mandate.