Sun, 09 Nov 2008
EDM 2141 (Part 2)
In a previous post I mentioned Early Day Motion 2141, the fact that I wrote to both of my Members of Parliament and the fact that Jim Cunningham MP, my Coventry MP, responded impressively quickly.
Well, I arrived for the family reunion this weekend and my parents had a letter from Stewart Jackson MP who had, as my Peterborough MP, sent his response to my Peterborough address. In this letter, he expresses his support for MySociety and EDM 2141. Needless to say, I'm pleased about this, and am glad that both of my representatives in the House of Commons share my views on what I consider to be an important motion. I'm also reasonably impressed by Stewart Jackson's response time which, while not quite as fast as Jim Cunningham's, was still only two days.
One thing that struck me about Stewart Jackson's letter was that it elaborated his position more than Jim Cunningham's letter did his, though this may be something to do with the response time. Admittedly, Stewart Jackson wrote only a paragraph of what might be stock text, but it was interesting nonetheless.
Another thing that struck me was that Stewart Jackson's letter, in contrast to Jim Cunningham's, mentioned the position of other members of his party (namely David Cameron and Theresa May) whom, needless to say, also support it. I suspect this is something to do with relative positions within their respective parties, though I don't really know enough to be sure. I don't recall whether or not I saw Theresa May and David Cameron's signatures on the EDM, so I'll have to check and possibly follow up with Stewart Jackson.
Another small thing of note is that while Theresa May and Harriet Harman both had 'MP' appended to their name, David Cameron did not. I wonder if this was just a minor oversight or a party marketing line.
Anyhow, I think the next thing I'm going to do is write a letter to both of my representatives asking what their position on free software and open standards is in general, to see whether I can work with either of them to encourage government to use more of it.
Posted: Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:25 | | Comments: 1
My Job (or, What I'm Doing With My Life)
I recently realised that, whilst people who I see on a regular basis are aware of what I'm doing at the moment, most people don't really have a clue about what I'm up to. As the latter group of people is fairly large, I thought I'd post to make people aware.
So, I'm currently doing an Intercalated Year as part of my Computer Science degree at the University of Warwick. This means that I'm spending a year working in industry (rather than on my degree), and means that I will get a "Computer Science (with Intercalated Year)" degree rather than a "Computer Science" degree, assuming I graduate. That really is the only difference it makes to me, academically.
I've been working since the end of August at an open source consultancy called credativ. credativ is a German company, with about forty staff in their office in Germany, but I work in the UK branch in Rugby, where there are three full-time staff. The company does a combination of systems administration, project work and bespoke coding.
For those of you not on Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS or Planet Bazaar (I'm looking at you, Facebook readers), an 'open source consultancy' is an IT consultancy that works primarily with open source software, sometimes known as 'free software'. This is software that is both free as in beer and free as in freedom, essentially meaning that anyone can take it and modify or use it as they wish. The fact that such a company exists is evidence that free software does not mean doom and gloom for software developers (though I won't vouch for those who have been unwise enough to tie them to proprietary systems).
As a consultancy, we, and therefore 'I', do a wide variety of things. So far, I've been involved in writing a presentation player using the OpenOffice API, creating Fedora 8 packages for OpenOffice, setting up monitoring using Nagios and munin, doing some Debian packaging and other general maintenance work.
So, that's what I'm doing with my life at the moment.
Posted: Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:19 | | Comments: 1