Hello everyone,

Forgive my intrusion on this list if this posting is inappropriate.
This article is sort of about advocacy but really is more about a
potential *opportunity* for advocacy than it is advocacy itself [;-)]
I apologize if it appears more than once I've had some trouble posting
due exclusively to our mailserver. This has also been posted to
comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc but that newsgroup appears somewhat awash in
spam (more so than some of the other comp.unix.bsd.* groups).

We are a small government program that is collecting information on
innovative uses of information technology in the community development
sector specifically, and in the public sector more generally:
especially in the context of smaller municipal governments.

I am interested in hearing about examples of open source or free
software being deployed in small to medium sized projects in these
areas. There are several examples of this on our site (not all Open
Source by any means) but we need to find more.

Look at:

http://smartcommunities.ic.gc.ca/toolkit/toolkit_e.asp

under "Infrastructure".

There is also an "Inventory" section where we are trying to gather
examples for use by our target audience of community leaders, and
small public sector organisations.

http://smartcommunities.ic.gc.ca/inventory/smartSolutions_e.asp

We are especially interested in the use of these technologies in the
area of service to the public - understood very broadly (anything from
kiosks, FTP sites, documentation libraries, etc. to full blown
interactive applications). Rather than strict implementation details
references to the projects would be more useful (reply by e-mail if
you wish). If any of you are developpers and are willing to refer us
to examples of your work in these areas visit the site for contact
details.

There may even be some market development opportunities that will
appear on our site in the future (mostly for local Canadian firms) so
if you'd like to stay informed please subscribe to our mailing list.

CAVEAT:

Since this is an advocacy group I should warn you in advance that the
above referenced site uses ASP for display and runs on NT (mea culpa)
.... but hey it is developped using a really cool java servlet
framework that runs on Apache using java servelet extensions. [;-)]

Regards,

--=20
G. Todd
Project Officer,  Industry Canada
Smart Communities/Collectivit=E9s ing=E9nieuses
http://smartcommunities.ic.gc.ca/