New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
Authored Comments
Great find. I was looking for something like this (although I didn't know I was). Thank you!
Of all items listed, I think it's the training concept that is most significant. Most companies now just assume that its employees have a working knowledge of some set of software, whether its the classic closed source stuff or the classic open source stuff. It seems that nobody ever wants to train people on anything, much less insist that their employees learn something new for their job, as if a pay cheque covers everything that an employee might do *except* learn something new on a computer.
As such, using open source becomes a roadblock, with the excuse that the workforce isn't trained for it, when the truth is that employees aren't trained for anything. Schools teach an atrociously limited set of computer "skills", and everyone picks up the rest of what the need to know as best they can.
Training should start well before the workplace, and it should focus on learning how computers work, how to learn new software, and ideally how to do basic scripting so that computers can actually provide an advantage over traditional tools like those things we *are* trained on: pen and paper.