Matt Brown and I recently (4 June) had a meeting with Prof Ted Zorn, regarding the Waikato 2020 Communications Trust and the Waikato Linux Users Group. Prof Zorn is in the Department of Management Communication in the School of Management at Waiakto University. The 2020 Communications Trust is a charitible trust set up with the basic objective of promoting “… discussion and investigation of ideas, knowledge and technology in new media and computer networking". The full objectives can be found at http://www.2020.org.nz/trust/princip.htm. They are basically looking at improving community absorption of modern IT, and improving the general understanding of IT in the community. One of the projects the Waikato 2020 Communications Trust is working on at the moment is called the ‘Waikato Community Net’, or “WaiCN” for short. This is being modelled on fairly successfull project run by the Wellington 2020 Communications Trust, unsurprisingly called the ‘Wellington Community Net’ or WCN for short. (http://www.wcn.net.nz/). WaiCN will provide a portal for community sites, which perhaps wouldn’t otherwise be able to decently host websites. This will have a secondary effect of perhaps becoming a de facto standard for looking for community information in this region. WaiCN also aims to improve community groups’ education overall, and to integrate and coordinate other community-oriented ICT programs. (Most of that was lifted from the project outline.) Prof Zorn contacted the WLUG to see if we were interested in working together with W2020CT (I’ll start abbreviating things here) on this project, and in general. We seem to share some similar goals, although ours are primarily focussed around F/OSS software, and the W2020CT is at least nominally neutral on this issue. Matt, Prof Zorn and I had a nice chat over lunch, during which we discussed the objectives of both groups, and how well we’d been meeting them. We pressed the point that some of the ultimate goals of OSS are not ‘to beat Mickey$haft’, but to provide choice, and to provide open standards. As it happens, a ready example of where open standards should be adhered to was provided by Prof Zorn himself, as he emailed the project blurb for WaiCN out as a MS Word document. Prof Zorn seemed interested in possible collaboration between the two groups, and Matt and I came away with the same feeling. He is going to talk with the Trustees of the W2020CT, and at some point we’ll swap representatives for meetings and get a better idea of what each group is doing. I personally think this collaboration will be useful from a couple of viewpoints. W2020CT provides a good vehicle for neutral advocacy of choice, and of open standards. This doesn’t mean they’ll push linux everywhere, but it might mean they make people aware of the choice. Also, they are part of a much larger organisation than WLUG, with better access to resources. Some of the people in the W2020CT and the national 2020CT are in fairly “high” places in terms of local and national government. Whether that matters or not is yet to be seen, but it’s worth remembering that our Charter does include advocacy of F/OSS to government, commercial and industrial bodies, something which we’ve not really been addressing lately. This is perhaps a good starting point. Daniel