Help for Open Source Stand at UK Guardian's Public Procurement Show June 14/15

This is a guest post from, well… I will let him introduce himself. But I have spoken to him recently about an upcoming event in June. It looks like it will be a big event in the region of 5000+ attendees some of which are the big decision makers in the UK government. So without any more delay here is the post!

William Duyck

I’m Malcolm Newbury a developer/management consultant , see guildfoss.com/home/Blogs.html to learn more about me. William has kindly allowed me to post an entry to tell you all about an open source stand that I am hosting with the Guardian on June 14/15. I am working with a range of people across healthcare and government to help make open source software the decision that no-one gets sacked for – i.e. the norm in the UK. It seems like a good time to do it, as the new government is determined to level the playing field in its procurement processes to ensure that the hundreds and hundreds of public sector buyers consider open source software as an option. Now clearly, there is no reason why Firefox and many other types of open source software couldn’t be on every desktop and server in government, but awareness of open source enterprise readiness is low.

Hence the stand to show case what open source software can do. We are aiming to break even, but want to ensure we get around 18-20 different OSS packages on the stand ,to give people a real taste what the power and breadth of what;s available. Along with each “pod position” comes a speaking slot at the stand where people can present a video or slides or simply talk about their software.

We already have commitment from people like Libreoffice, Joomla, Drupal and also commercial open source models like Jaspersoft and also charitable initiatives like Raceonline, just to demonstrate that open source has a range of business models.

Now I believe that Firefox – the universal browsing platform – should have pride of place as a “gold sponsor” for the stand and be the systemic-feature for the whole stand and reflected in the stand branding, t-shirts for participants, etc. I am also involving a theatre company to provide a human statue of a business man in a pin strip suit, whose suit is cut away by passers by (handed small scissors) to reveal a superman suit underneath – but with Firefox branding.

So to achieve all this, I will need some help, in terms of a speaker or two, marketing swag and perhaps even a converted superman lycra outfit.

Can anyone help?

Just comment here or drop me a line via events [at] guildfoss [dot] com and include “guardian stand” in the subject line.