It's been quiet on this blog. A long vacation that was not really a vacation, more on that later.
Last week I was visiting the Dutch Caribbean by invitation of the local government to do the opening keynote (ODF 1 2) on their conference on open standards and opensource. Curacao, one of the islands of the Dutch Antillies is about to become fully independent nation state and that means a lot of re-design of the local IT systems of the government and public sector. The government is determined to maximise the opportunities offered by open standards and opensource software to move the new governemnt, the local educational system and economy forward. For education an OLPC project is being considered because 3 PCs per school is not the way into the 21st century. Hopefully the new Internet Exchange (based on the Dutch one) will bring down the cost of bandwith so that all those OLPC's will be able to go online.
All of this will not be easy to achieve. Curacao is a very small entity to function as an independent nation and do everything themselves. There is a great need for expert knowledge and training to bring local IT-staff and administrators up to speed and the available budgets for this are very limited.Curacao spends about 20 million pounds per year on proprietary software licenses (mostly in government and other public sector), this amounts to about half a month's wages per citizen. If this can be reduced by 30-50% the budget required to make the desired changes is available (assuming the total IT-budgets can be kept at the same level for the time being).
Because this visit also included several meetings with local dignitaries and media appearances I was invited to stay for a whole week in a beautiful apartment west of Willemstad. Many thanks to Ace Suares who has been working for open-IT on his island for many years. He was the driving force behind the whole conference and a wonderful host.
