Hi wlug, This is an update on Hamilton City Council 10-Year Plan and the recommendations that were made to propose the use Open Source Software. You may remember that in March-April of this year, two written submissions were made to Hamilton City Council proposing “Open Source Software as their IT strategy” be included in their 10-Year Plan. Plus, at their hearings in May, I delivered a five minute presentation. My original inspiration for making the submission was based on a Hamilton City Council document titled, “Have Your Say Hamilton”. This 13 page document was delivered to all Hamilton households. On page three it stated, “We're serious about cutting costs”. Available from the library and on-line, the Council provided a 96 page “Draft 10-Year Plan”. Page 86 of this plan, in the section “Support Services”, listed five items that were IT related and indicated that Council were planning to spend over $1 million per year over the next 10 years on these IT items. My submission to Council proposed that they adopt using Open Source Software as a way of cutting IT costs. I have received an e-mail, dated 7 August 2012, from Hamilton City Council informing me that the final 10-Year Plan was adopted on 29 June 2012. The e-mail included two pdf documents: A one page personalized letter thanking me for my submission, and an 8 page summary document titled, “2012-22 10-Year Plan Decisions”. While the letter was somewhat personalised, and thanked me for my submission, it did not actually state if my submission had been adopted or not. The letter claimed the Council made their final decisions with two goals top of mind - getting the city’s finances back on track, and continuing to have a city that people want to live in and do business in. The letter I received advised that the Final 10-Year Plan is down-loadable from: www.hamilton.co.nz/10yearplan Volume 1 is 96 a page (6.4MB) pdf document and Volume 2 is an 88 page (2.9MB) pdf. In searching through both of these documents, I find no mention of the Council adopting a policy of using Open Source Software in order to reduce costs. The only IT related statements that I found are: The same 5 x “Supported Services” that I previously found in the Draft. i.e. In Volume 1 on page 86 a total $10.9 million is allocated over 10 years. An item has been added on page 86 as another “Support Service”. This item is referred to as: “Finance lease funding infrastructure equipment”, which may relate to IT. This is an additional $8.1 million over the next 10 years Page 19 of Volume 2 states that, “Intangible assets comprise: Computer software licences are capitalised at historic cost and are amortised on a straight-line basis over their estimated useful lives (5 years). Costs associated with maintaining computer software are recognised as an expense when incurred.” To test that my Open Source V3.4 Document Viewer was searching correctly I entered the word “velodrome”. As expected, this word is not found in any of the Council's documents. In Summary: It does not appear that Hamilton City Council have implemented an Open Source Software strategy. It does appear that between the Draft and the Final document, the Council succeeded in almost doubling their IT spending from an average $1million per year to almost $2 million per year over the next 10 years. So much for being “serious about cutting costs”. Around March next year (2013) the Council will commence accepting public submissions to the first Annual Review of this 10-Year Plan. If anyone would like to propose that they implement an Open Source Software strategy, then that appears to be the next public opportunity to do so. A final note... Considering the Hamilton City Council e-mailed me on 7 August 2012, I would like to explain my delay in writing this update... I use a “closed source” e-mail service that is supplied by a company based in USA. I believe the Hamilton City Council is a client of this US company and annually spends a considerable amount of Hamilton Rate Payers revenues purchasing software products from this US company. When the Hamilton City Council sent their e-mail to me, this US company's closed source e-mail service automatically placed it, not in my Inbox folder, but in my Junk folder.