On Thursday the 18th of November, the WLUG was priveleged to have RodneyHide, the leader of NewZealand's ACT political party, address us.

See the MeetingTopics.2004-11-18 page for an outline of this enjoyable meeting.

The WLUG should focus on raising Parliamentary questions, and Rodney will endeavor to assist us in formulating these in the most effective manner.

Notes on the process:

Questions should be as specific as possible, especially with respect to dates. This makes evading the questions difficult.
The original answer documents can be requested if there is a suspicion that the provided answer may be male bovine fecal matter.

With that in mind:

RodneyHide asked us what questions we'd like various government departments asked. This page is where we can discuss questions and talk about rewording them before their submission. Each question is made into a title so that the discussion about that question can happen underneath.

How much money has this department spent in the last financial year on Microsoft products?

How many machines within this department are running Linux in production as of today?

How many internal applications within this department are currently written in a way that are not immediately portable to other operating systems?

How much money has this department spent in the last financial year on protecting against and recovering from worms and viruses?

How much downtime has this department experienced in person hours that was due to a loss of service caused by worms and viruses?

Why does this department consider it safe to publish .doc files on its public website?

This question needs to be targetted only at the departments that do the above :) References:

• http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/23.27.html#subj6
• http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/23.50.html#subj7

Perhaps amusing facts can be found in these doc files revision histories which can be rephrased in form of a question.

Why does this department not have versions of its files available for download in a more open format such as pdf or html?

(Paired with the above question where appropriate)

How much of the last round of funding body (FRST?/TBG?) projects gone towards development of Open Source Software as defined by http://www.opensource.org/?

Why does FRST? not consider the production of Open Source software to be a valid objective for funding especially in the light of high quality software like MozillaFirefox being produced in New Zealand?

Other things we need to phrase into questions:

• Microsoft in Schools
• ComCom? & ADSL in New Zealand?