Hi,
Somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind there are cogs rotating and
now and again I have ideas. Today seems to be one of those days.
It struck me that there are several things that we could do within Ireland.
There are several machines not being used by the government, these are
mostly the evoting machines.
If anyone can publish pros and cons for each of these we might manage to
get together a few salient thoughts and make proposals to the people who
hold in their hands the ability to make things happen.
It occurs to me that the evoting machines were a and continue to be a
waste of resources. This should be rectified.
They could be used for public good, or reassigned roles where they could
run free software, the task may not be as hard as it seems.
The politics and work of getting them out of cold storage, stripped
down, and ready for action is something that we need to consider in
considering and of the suggestions below.
So the ideas are as follows:
1) Provide them to the UN as part of our annual contribution, the
calculation is not of interest to me now however this would be a
proposed use, there is a need when disasters strike worldwide to provide
databases of information in a fashion that those who wish to contribute
to aid relief need to be able to coordinate their data.
The core of the suggestion is that there be an international database
with suitable locale font features enabled.
It would provide a large scale clustered "web interface" to assist
manage any disaster.
A wiki or blog with some serious modifications, to track and identify
people places and materials damaged by such a disaster, none the less a
large scale database running free software.
2) Attach them to the national grid of computing resources for
scientific research.
3) Run distributed number crunching for "approved" charitable projects.
4) Maintain the status quo
5) Anyone with alternative ideas.
There you go just to get the ball rolling.The only condition of the
proposal from perspective should only run free software.
IFSO's role would be to provide assistance to assist any such a proposal
into life.
Regards,
Paul O'Malley