Yes Simtandile, fully agree with that. When I meant government I was thinking more from the perspective of government being the one’s to engage with academia and industry here to also generate demand for OSS services and support, to promote the use of open standards, ensure open standards for tenders so that OSS has an equal opportunity, etc. We’d also seek inputs from public and others but our realm of control is more government.
I’m pretty sure much of what we’d do and standards and policy we’d recommend for government is equally applicable to citizens and industry too. But apart from vendors wanting to provide OSS services to government, do we broaden our scope much wider than that and include other sectors of society and industry completely unrelated to government services? If so we’d need to think a lot broader in terms of representation at meetings?
We’d certainly want what we’re doing to rub off much broader across the country. I’m just thinking of representation though and where and what we intend to focus on. Government has been a tough nut to crack already, so do we focus on eating an arm and a leg, or go for the whole elephant 😉