Snookered..

This week we had some disappointing news about some of the resources at our venue.

The Mawson Centre, in Mawson Lakes, is a joint project between the University of South Australia, The South Australian Education Department (Department of Education and Childrens Services) and the City of Salisbury. This is generally excellent. The Univerisity gets another building to use during the day, the local school get some much needed office space, and the Council has a readly made location for the public library.

The building is managed by the University, and it allows people from these three community serving areas to interact in ways that they normally wouldn't.

So what's the problem? In a couple of words, University beauocracy and proprietory software.

Part of the resources provided by the University are the buildings computers and network and we were hoping to make use of these during the event. Unfortunately, these systems have been setup with propietory software and locked down.

The systems themselves allow for the three types of users, Univerisity, School and Library to have separate sets of software programs available (selected when you log in) but the actual process for how this software is selected has been hidden. A system does exist for makingn changes, which involves signoffs, testing and evaluation, but the impression that has been given (and I have no facts about it) is that it is highly beaurocratic and will take a long time.

Community use of the Mawson Centre is not going to go away, and neither is Software Freedom Day. There are some very simple things that can be done here which could make the situation better for everyone.

I'm already looking forward to Software Freedom Day 2007!