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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 commercial proprietary software products?
How many machines within this department are running Linux or other OpenSource operating systems 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?
This question sounds a little vague... maybe 'internal applications' should be better defined -- JohnMcPherson
How much money has this department spent in the last financial year on protecting against and recovering from worm and virus infections?
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:
Perhaps amusing facts can be found in these 
doc files
revision histories which can be rephrased in form of a question.
(zcat notes: searching for files of type "doc" with no search string works better than looking for the string ".doc" and then excluding the department of conservation.. :-)
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/?
When awarding contracts for software application development, would the department consider favouring Open Sourced solutions as being in the best interests of NewZealand citizens? If not, why not?
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?
- Māori language translations/interfaces (eg gnome 2.6 and kde have some 'mi' locale support). Educational software that has a US focus rather than NZ? (video/audio accents, history (think 'Oregon Trail', etc)
