Jordy Blog

Tech in Government

The Tuttle IT fiasco reminded of my “Intro to IT” professor who, showing the class how to check email, complained that he was getting 500+ spams per day –despite the fact that he kept clicking to “opt-out” of the mailings. I sat there in complete disbelief as he “opted-out” of several blatant spams on the wide screen projector in front of the whole class. It was funny at first, but it got old when I had to guess which answer he thought was right on the exams. Needless to say, I decided to get experiential credit for the follow-up course rather than endure the comical “learning” an additional semester.

On a serious note, how do complete technical morons (conservative and liberal alike) make it into positions of authority? And once they’re in, how do they stay? It’s frightening how tech-adverse some government officials are, but what’s more scary is that they pretend that they aren’t. Some even pretend to be experts. (I’m looking at you, Orrin). It’s amazing that they think they can get away with it!

From a technical standpoint, I really like Pete Ashdown, founder of XMission and Utah senatorial candidate. I don’t think he has much of a chance of winning against a senior incumbent Republican here in Utah.

But I digress…

If you liked this post, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Pete Ashdown on Open Source Government

Pete Ashdown (founder of Xmission and candidate for US Senate) will address UVLUG this Saturday:

Pete will present “Democracy 2.0: Open Source Government,” showing how the Federal Government can learn from the open source movement. He will talk about how the government can stop ignoring technology and use it to better the lives of all Americans. He will also take questions on any issue.

This will undoubtedly be a great discussion for people interested in technology and government in Utah.

Pete’s discussion will start at 12:30 in room CS-404 on UVSC campus. For those who’d like to stay, there’ll be a Linux installfest directly afterward.

SSS is a Hit!

A few days ago, Dave posted about Software for Starving Students on Digg, and the downloads started coming immediately. With well over 20,000 downloads the last time I checked (a couple of days ago), the project has become a major success. We’ve transferred over 11 terabytes of data and our seeders have held up fine, although a lot of that was done through xmission and other generous mirrors. We also learned a valuable lesson: to turn off wiki and other high computation areas of our site beforehand next time.

We’ve had about 10 people volunteer to be distributor liaisons in schools all over, as well as several interested in helping with translation and distribution for versions in Italy and Cambodia. It’s incredible how small the world has become because of the flattening force of internet. It’s amazing that a few volunteers can work on a little project and have it distributed all over the world, instantly. And that’s one of the reasons that open source is thriving: it leverages free labor from skilled workers distributed all over the world, then redistributes contributions almost instantaneously around the globe. I have a lot to say about the dynamics of open source but will do that later. I’m just glad to see the SSS have seen such tremendous success. After many late nights, it’s rewarding to see our efforts pay off, and it feels good to give a little back to the open source community after so many years of quality mooching.