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After suffering 10+ years of working for Torbay Council's IT department. I have been informed after numerous presentations about open standards / open source and the current central government thinking on IT strategy, that the strategy in Torbay Council will be to continue to provide Microsoft / Microsoft based solutions for everything "Possible". To quote: "If I had my way, everything would be Microsoft". It would seem that the long term strategy is "business as usual" despite government policy favouring Open Source "Where ever possible", which unfortunately my director of IT interprets as "Not at all possible". While I will not give up fighting, I have decided that I want to change tactics and address the business community in Torbay through the Torbay Development Agency (TDA). I know that some (in high places) will see this as a conflict of interests, so I intend to present my presentation materials to them prior to doing the presentation. Clearly this means that I can not be critical either directly or indirectly of council policy, but since this is NOT my intention there should be no issues. Ultimately if they disapprove of my presentation, I will have to make the decision to go ahead "and be damned" or search for a "proxy" to deliver the presentation.... I figure that may sets of eyes are better than one so I am seeking the communities help in finding research papers to back up my presentation. The presentation will be on the lines of how to stimulate economic growth through the adoption and use of Open Source in the Torbay Business Community. This equally applies in other areas of Devon and Cornwall (and beyond) but this is the focus of my presentation and all will be welcome to copy, amend and reuse the resulting resources. Some Themes are: Open Standards - importance of and leverage for buisness. Open Source awareness - strengths and weaknesses. Examples of open source adoptions in Community / Business. Adoption strategies - analysis of strengths and weaknesses. Encourage local training programmes to support skill levels needed to support open source adoption in business. I am generating a kdissert mind map at the moment which will hopefully feed into a presentation to the TDA. Ultimately I would like to be able to provide an open resource set that could be used to duplicate presentations tailored for other business interest groups. What I am really stuck with is finding articles (preferably with referenced statistics) that show how adoption of Open Source in economically deprived areas has stimulated the economy. This is probably because the real savings / costs are difficult to quantify to any degree of accuracy that researchers are confident to publish. However, if anyone comes across a specific reference to this (with stats) could they please post to me or the group email address, I would be most appreciative ..... Any other constructive suggestions would be welcomed. In the meantime I will be getting back to my quest.... ;-) Thanks Tom. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html