Sam Varghese
Monday, 23 March 2009 04:57
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
The information about total cost of running FOSS was cobbled together by Wright - one of the advantages of having a competent geek as IT adviser. He says that there is a support base within the party, though some people "think that this is getting in their way. Why should they have to learn to type their document up with this tool that has the file menu slightly structured differently or something? But generally there's a big support base who understand the advantages of free software."
Wright looks after the Victorian set-up and also manages a server in Canberra remotely. The Greens in NSW run half their desktops on Linux and the servers are all Linux. In Victoria, the desktops use the Linux Terminal Server Project, an add-on package that allows many people to simultaneously use the same computer.
Another person involved is Alan Kennington who lives in Victoria and runs the South Australian network remotely. "He's written databases for us from scratch, organising when we hand out "how to vote" cards. Our poll day scheduling program - he wrote that. We've got VoIP as well, we've got an Asterisk server. Our whole phone system in Victoria runs on Asterisk. We've also got an uplink connection to a voice vendor in Southbank," says Wright.
He says things are now much easier than when they began. "When we started doing it we were a bit blinded by our enthusiasm. But now most things have fallen into place and it works pretty seamlessly, you know. We left the users on Fedora 7 and when we update them to Fedora 10, they'll be pretty impressed, I think, with the seamlessness, compared to Fedora 7."
There have been complaints from users. "Quite a few (complaints) about older versions of OpenOffice.org, a few formatting problems, when you converted Word documents and things like that," says Wright.
"A few mistakes happened where people just weren't trained properly so they sent .odt documents off to users who didn't have OpenOffice.org. We tried to say if you're doing public broadcasting, have an .odt, a .doc, a pdf and send all of those, to enable all interaction.
"The complaints were more due to the fact that you've got to get user acceptability, so somehow you've got to show them the cost benefits. For people who don't understand, you try and educate them on the ideology, but someone might not buy that. The next thing you go in on is the economics and say you buy in because we're saving the party money which we can spend on campaigning."
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