[ossig] Request for comment and support

[Redzuan AffandiŽ <redzuan@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

This year has been an exciting year for Open Source in Malaysia.
Through the effort to develop a National Open Source Policy as well as
the Public Sector OSS Masterplan, many of us have been able to come
together to discuss and envision the plan for OSS in Malaysia.
Although only the Public Sector OSS Masterplan has been publicly
announced and the National Open Source Policy (draft) still have to
undergo the process of getting the government's endorsement, we feel
that it is already a good development and we hope for a better Open
Source year, next year.

There also seems to be more Open Source activities this year and thank
to IOSN @ APDIP & MNCC-OSSIG, we had the opportunity to interact with
RMS and gained better understanding on Free & Open Source Software.
Several of us also took initiatives to form the MOSSIA and I believe
there are other efforts on OSS which I will not able to list all here.

This year, we in MIMOS took initiatives to organise the OSS Technical
Workshop. To-date, we managed to only organise 5 OSSTW sessions plus
one OSS & IP Seminar early this month. All those workshops & seminar
are free-of-charge and is open to anybody to attend.

For year 2005, we planned to continue creating this platform and
having this type of workshop but with better planning. There are many
aspects to be improved so we decided to start with planning on the
dates for OSS Workshop throughout the year. Attached is a document
that provides all the proposed dates. The calendar also highlight
other OSS related events / activities and the dates of OSS-TW were
proposed after taking into consideration public holidays inc. those
holidays specific to KL & Slgr only.

We also would like to invite more OSS people to come forward and
present something / share their knowledge or certain expertise on OSS.
To facilitate in getting more people to come forward to present, we
are working on some guidelines and we also suggest that may be it is a
good idea to have specific theme for the workshop and the theme can be
changed every 3 months (quarterly). Then we can have specific topic
based on that particular theme. On this one, we seek community's input
but for the first quarter - I'm suggesting we keep it as a General OSS
Topics. The final output might then look something as follows :

Q1 : Theme : General OSS Topics 

Workshop 1 : OSS Trends 
Workshop 2 : ...

Q2 : Theme : OSS for Small-Medium Enterprise (example)

Workshop 1 : Topic bla bla 
.....

By taking this approach, it is hope that :

1. More OSS people will get idea and can come forward to present.
2. We can target more non-OSS people to come.
3. hopefully - to achieve better result for OSS - more people
subscribing and adopting it.

I need to stop before my email become too lenghty, but I believe
another concern is about - what's in it for me ? Please also provide
ideas / suggestions on this part as I believe we in MIMOS OS Group
need to also understand / have some idea on it so that we can proposed
something workable and acceptable to both party.

regards,

-- 
redzuan

Calendar2005OSSTW.sxw.pdf