Søren C's blog

Thursday Michael, Niels and myself represented the Danish Ubuntu community at a conference about open source software in the public sector.

From left to right: Me, Michael, Louis and Niels.

We shared a community booth with the nice people from the Danish OpenOffice.org and Mozilla communities.

The conference took place at the historic Børsen.
We handed out all our remaining 8.10 desktop cd’s, got to talk with a lot of people and I believe we managed to convince a few people that Ubuntu (and Linux) has come a long way the last couple of years. Unfortunately I wasn’t quick enough to get a picture when one of the speakers, Christian Lanng, booted his laptop while it was plugged into the projector and revealed that he is in fact running Ubuntu.

You can find resources (presentations etc.) from the conference and discussions of the conference at Digitalisér.dk (in Danish).

As part of the Danish LoCo Team I have been invited to attend the conference Open source-software i det offentlige (Open Source Software in the public sector) on March 19 in Copenhagen.

The conference is a part of the governments software strategy (as formulated here in Danish) and is hosted by the Videnscenter for Software (the people who run The Software Exchange).

Hopefully we (along with the other open source projects and companies present at the conference) can convince some of the decision-makers and IT professionals in the Danish public sector that Open Source Software is a useful alternative to the current closed source solutions being used throughout the public sector.
In the Danish Team we have been discussing what arguments are best used to convince this audience. Our experience when it comes to advocacy has been mostly with individuals who need an alternative for their machine with Windows and MS Office at home. But what arguments will work best at this conference?
Some of the top selling points we came up with on our mail list seem to be:

• No malvare (viruses etc.)
• Low TCO
• Easy to administrate

There are of course many other advantages of Ubuntu and open source software, but what would be your top three selling points to this audience?

(Links to the conference on Facebook and LinkedIn.)

As promised here are pictures of some members of the Danish Ubuntu LoCo team, at the Open Source Days 2008 in Copenhagen. All pictures by Niels Kjøller Hansen.

From left to right: Niels, Elge Sander, Søren (me), Mads, Mark and Sakse.

The moose is named after Helge Sander, our Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation. (Elg means moose in Danish.)

The Software Exchange was running the booth with the fancy setup. They work under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and help the public sector in Denmark choose relevant software, in particular open source software.

Below are some pictures of LoCo team members lounging in front of the portrait of the sabdfl.