@alberto, you said something very important: “brewing a local community with very strong in one or more of the staple projects”
It’s actually the most difficult part. The governement is indeed trying to do it but is more focused on companies rather than local communities and on big business entreprise software rather than opensource ones. The reason of these choices are quite obvious. But as edgeryders, I think that another way more decentralized and more grassroots based is possible and complementary.
Anyway, this strategy difficult mainly for these 3 reasons:
- top-to-bottom strategy with opensource community members tends to fail because of resistance, misunderstanding and lack of enthusiasm. Local opensource developers tends to be like Western ones, they want to reinvent the wheel, learn an heterodox programming language, code an OS and other not very productive projects…
- if the chosen technology failed, you’ve put a lot of money in one basket… this seems to be the case in the past (OLPC, Firefox OS and some other projects). This leads to discouragement
- it requires a lot of time and trust-building to funnel people to the same goal
That’s why I’m trying to build something step-by-step. The goal of the first one is to build a sense of community and funnel scattered people.