December 31, 2005

Help Wanted : CIO : Massachusetts State : Experience With Politics A Must!

Experience with technology? If you have both, I'm sure it wouldn't hurt. But my best guess suggests that at this stage, a solid background in politics will look FAR MORE enticing to Governor Romney than will any sort of extensive experience within the technology sector.

The Open-Source Martyr Meets His Fate

Published reports say the Massachusetts state CIO, best known for his plan to move all state documents to the OpenDocument file format, has resigned as of January 9, 2006, about a year before his edict was to become effective.

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Kurt just pinged me with the link to the above announcement and follow-up commentary from David Coursey (which he (Kurt) then followed with "I finally stopped reading him when I realized that he's about as unbiased as a football cheerleader" :) I think it's safe to suggest we will cover this topic again in an upcoming recording session for the eXplorations podcast. If you haven't already, I would add Kurt's Atom feed to your feed reader as undoubtedly he will have plenty of intriguing follow-up content on this topic.

One thing I will quickly add:

For those unaware, Mitt Romney was the guy that was brought in as the head of SLOC (Salt Lake Olympic Committee) to clean up the mess that came as a result of the now infamous SLOC Olympic scandal from six or so years back. Obviously this particular 'scandal' (although you be hard pressed to get even a pro-Microsoft/OpenXML guy like me to go along with such a label -- but it definitely has caused quite a stir none-the-less) took place while Mitt was already in office. But even still, with plenty of skilled experience with 'smoothing things out', there's no doubt in my mind that this particular clean-up job will be executed with near perfect precision.

With a likely bid for the 2008 Presidential Election, you can hedge your bets we're about to witness something quite magical with this one. If Mitt Romney, a somewhat conservative Republican (although he has his 'liberal-minded' areas as well(UPDATE: Maybe I should strike that last bit... in reading the current state of his Wikipedia entry it seems he has backed away from what I considered to be his liberal-minded side. For the record, I considered his earlier stance on Abortion to be somewhat(<- key word) liberal-minded, which for someone who is quite conservative in nearly all their viewpoints, to allow room for ANY sort of 'Pro-Choice' ideals is enough, in my opinion, to suggest they have 'liberal-minded' areas) can clean up a pretty nasty situation in the SLOC scandal to then convince the fairly hard-core liberal-minded, Democratic Party-heavy voters of Massachusetts to elect him into office, I wouldn't put any political accomplishment out of his reach.

Stay-tuned.