Speaking to government

Sunday, 15 January 2006  |  Cristian Tibirna

On January 10th 2006 I was offered the opportunity to speak to the directors of IT services from the Québec gouvernment. Québec is one of the provinces of Canada, with rather important economic and cultural power in North America.

Profesor Daniel Pascot, director of the Department of Organizational IT Systems in the Administration Sciences Faculty here at Laval University, a fervent supporter of free software, invited me for a one hour conference on KDE, that I called "KDE -- le choix judicieux" (PDF, French, 417kB, tr: "KDE -- the proper choice"). This was part of a 2 and 1/2 days seminar on Free Software, especially conceived for this type of audience.

It was the first time I was addressing such a group. The possible consequence on adopting Linux and KDE on the local scene of public information systems is non-negligeable. Thus I took quite a bit of time to prepare and refine my speech. It was a rich experience.

I tried to conduct the conference more like a discussion with the assistance and I partly succeeded. As a consequence, I took two hours instead of one (once again, I appologize, Professor Pascot :-) ). During the presentation, it became clear quite rapidly that the first part -- containing case studies of applied Free Software in government and education setups -- should really have come second, after the detailed presentation of KDE itself.

Another interesting observation is that, for the people exterior to the Free Software movement -- the very people we would like to attract to using the results of our work --, it is rather tricky or, perhaps better said, ineffective, to keep describing KDE as being a whole of four parts: desktop, applications, development framework and community. We need suggestive nicknames for each of these aspects and clearly separate descriptions.

Questions that I expected came from the audience:

  • "Doesn't it bother you to know that everybody can take inspiration from your code, or even the code itself, without retribution?"
  • "Will Free Software and open document formats bring stability to this confusing world full of incompatibilities?"
  • "Can I find a way to install KDE if I go to kde.org?"
  • "Why do you give away so much hard work, for free?"
  • "Is all this difficult to install?"
  • "How do you manage viruses and worms?"

But I also had questions that show that, even at high levels, technology is key:

  • "What programming languages does KDE use?"
  • "Why don't you use Java?"
  • "How would KDE fit in a high security environment, like a nuclear reactor installation?"
    • And the most interesting:
  • "Does KDE include an information indexing and search system for the data of the desktop user?"

As I said, it was a very interesting experience. People didn't quit the room screaming ;-). On the contrary, I had comments at the end from people curious to experiment with our software. I should have had live CDs with KDE distros...

I am trying now to figure out what would be the best continuation. Gaining some kind of direct contact to at least a few of these persons would be very beneficial for everybody. Anyways I'm very excited to see that finally things start to move in Québec (and Canada) too with respect to Free Software. Let's hope that the word gets passed.