On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 7:43 AM, Binand Sethumadhavan binand@gmail.comwrote:
On 26 April 2013 07:21, Ashwin Dixit ganeshacomputes@gmail.com wrote:
I have the rare privilege of getting the attention of someone who frames technology policy for India. I have been asked to prepare a document in 1000 ASCII characters or less, that makes the case for Linux. My contact is highly educated, yet not very technical.
Advocay for complex technology in 1000 characters. Hilarious. Is he recommending dove soap? That apart the DIT has already advocated the use of FOSS.
So typical of India, that someone who "frames technology policy" is considered "not very technical". :-)
Or patient enough to understand the con he is being sold thru closed software, by means of at least a reasonably detailed doc.
Apart from that, your document has a bunch of issues, like:
- Usage of weasel words - "generally considered", "goes a long way towards".
- Blames the reader (the policy maker) - the whole "foreign mechanics"
reference.
- Easily beaten by counterarguments - "We have the shared source
programme - your students can also study, improve and share our software freely".
- Structurally too, I find it haphazardly organized. I would suggest
you put it up on a public Wiki somewhere and let us all edit it.
Here is how it could be structured (a framework suggested by a professor of mine, and one which I find is very effective):
Feature being recommended: "Open source in government and education" Evidence that the feature is good: "The world uses it and contributes to it, no vendor lock-in/dependency on American corporates" Benefits of adopting the feature: "Reduces cost, less chance of defacing/PR disasters (not strictly true!), helps us compete with the world".
I don't have the time to do a full rewrite now, maybe over the weekend. When do you have to submit this?
Without understanding the specifics, one would be making mostly very wrong assumptions. For example use for education would be utterly different for use in land records, or water management ( GIS ).
None the less 1) Who is the target audience 3) Who are the end users 3) What is the geographical distribution 4) Who does the support 5) Who does the training of the end users 6) What typical programs do they intend to run ( we might be able to derive some answers from 2). 7) What backend databases are in use. 8) Time frames
Binand