Hello everyone,
Forgive my intrusion in this forum if this posting is inappropriate.
This article is sort of about advocacy but really is more about a
potential *opportunity* for advocacy than it is advocacy itself [
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A similar message has also been posted to comp.unix.bsd.* and
comp.os.linux.* newsgroups. We'd be most grateful if someone
with access to any internal e-smith.com lists or customer/vendor
support networks would forward this posting or pass on the link
to the forum web board item to such lists if it is appropriate.
We are a small government program that is collecting information on
innovative uses of information technology in the community development
sector specifically, and in the public sector more generally: especially in the context of municipal governments and local community-driven projects.
I am interested in hearing about examples of open source or free software being deployed in small to medium sized projects in these areas. If anyone here has deployed E-Smith as part of a "smart service" package for public sector projects such as on line information portals, kiosks, or as part of the infrastructure (router, file server etc. for such a project we'd be interested to hear about it. There are several examples of "tools" on our site (not all Open Source by any means) but we need to find more. Look at:
http://smartcommunities.ic.gc.ca/toolkit/toolkit_e.aspunder "Infrastructure" (the e-smith.org site and E-Smith server will appear there shortly as well). There is also an "Inventory" section where we are trying to gather examples for use by our target audience of community leaders, and small public sector organisations.
http://smartcommunities.ic.gc.ca/inventory/smartSolutions_e.aspWe are especially interested in the use of these technologies in the
area of service to the public - understood very broadly (anything from
kiosks, FTP sites, documentation libraries, etc. to full blown
interactive applications). Rather than strict implementation details
references to the projects would be more useful (reply by e-mail if
you wish). If any of you are developpers and are willing to refer us
to examples of your work in these areas visit the site for contact
details.
There may even be some market development opportunities that will
appear on our site in the future (mostly for local Canadian firms) so
if you'd like to stay informed please subscribe to our mailing list. We
have a target audience of several hundred communities planning on
deploying IT projects who'd be *very* interested to hear what they or
their systems people and suppliers can get for essentially no cost
(or with generous support contracts for less that 1000$).
CAVEAT: I should warn you in advance that the above referenced site
uses ASP for display and runs on NT (mea culpa) .... but hey it is
developped using a really cool portable java bean framework that runs
on Apache using java servelet extensions. [
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We also have a some what moribund discussion forum which I hope
to liven up with "guest hosts" or interviews somewhat like Slashdot. We'd supply
a list of FAQs in advance (we'd even include suggested answers for the especially
harried executive) and ask you to make an initial posting responding to
some of the questions (we'd publicize it in advance on our mailing list). Then you could follow any of the subsequent discussion for a few days and respond where needed. The forum format is due to change into something more blogish like PHPNuke or Glasscode (more likely since it uses servlets).
Anyone interested in participating in the forum can contact me for further information.
Regards,
--
G. Todd
Project Officer, Industry Canada
Smart Communities/Collectivités ingénieuses
http://smartcommunities.ic.gc.ca/
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