Confidentially to team@ and finland@:
I had today a meeting at the Tampere city hall with city council member Olli-Poika Parviainen (Green party).
Greens and Left in Tampere are very pro-FOSS, and the Left group actually made an initiative in December (https://palvelut2.tampere.fi/valtuustoaloitteet/yksittainen.php?diaarinumero...) that all schools in Tampere should start using LTSP. However I don't think it will pass, since the basic IT infrastructure in schools is run by the city and using LTSP only in the schools but not in the entire city would require new administrative structures.
Greens have previously also made an general initiative to increase FOSS usage in Tampere in 2004 (http://www.tampere.fi/ekstrat/hallinto/aloite/04/164.htm), but it was vague and didn't make a big difference.
Now we discussed with Parviainen that the Greens in Tampere should make a new initiative that would simply require city IT department to install at least OpenOffice or LibreOffice in all city computers side-by-side with MS Office, so that city employees would get exposure to FOSS and also that the city would be able to process ODT-documents anywhere. This would be a small step on a path to the right direction and very likely to pass and in the long run open doors for further actions.
Parviainen asked me to send him some arguments around the theme of increasing competition in software procurement, so that the right-wing parties would like the initiative more. Then Parviainen will write the initiative and send a draft to me work further on in about to weeks. He plans to get the initiative to the next city council meeting on 7th of March. (The motivation for the quick speed is that Parliament elections will be held 2011-04-17 and Greens are desperate to get visibility in this topic.)
We also planned to give a few copies of VALO-CD to the Tampere city IT-chief at the same time the initiative is made public, so that he would get to know FOSS a little better in case he does not have a history using it. Fear for the unknown is likely to decrease with FOSS exposure over time.
I also gave a bunch of my FSFE business cards so that Parviainen can give them to any city council member who wants to know more about what FOSS is.
I also reported about this quickly to MP Sumuvuori and my next step is to make more contacts in other municipalities and also outside the Green party.
(Sorry for sloppy spelling, I'm in a hurry, as always..)