By Simon Moores, 11 May 2005 12:35
COMMENT Despite the savings local governments could realise from using open source software, Simon Moores is sceptical that they will ever be savvy enough to take advantage of the technology.
I'm having an open source moment - again!
This week our re-shuffled government will have to ponder news from the British Educational Communications and Technology Association (BECTA) that UK primary schools might save as much as half of their IT budget by moving to open source software.
Elsewhere open source is beginning to gain small footholds in local government and the eGov monitor reports that software called Groupserver is now available to help councils establish online forums focused specifically on local issues at little to no cost. The Brighton & Hove Council and the London Borough of Newham are undergoing pilot projects with the software, which is released under the Gnu Public Licence.
But hold on a moment - open source aside, is local government really that enthusiastic over the concept of citizen online forums? Close to despair over my own local council's limited grasp of the internet, I've started my own local news and opinions portal. Inside three months it's close to becoming a full-time job and is making both my local council and local newspaper a little twitchy as visitor traffic grows thanks to some help from local radio and Google.
Where I live in Kent, respect for local government is not high, as represented by a reader comment posted on my website: "Anarchy without taxation would be better than the institutional denial of service we currently experience and pay so much for."
The sad fact of the matter is that local government here and in many other deprived areas of the country has visibly little or no interest in the internet as a serious communications medium. This may be for a number of different reasons. The council workforce isn't internet literate and the bulk of the population fall on the wrong side of the digital divide, for instance. And with only two men to clear a hundred square miles of public space of litter, there's no money for fancy social experiments, online or otherwise.
If my local council was to use this free open source solution to improve their limited online presence, they would need to employ someone who understood it and could monitor the results. That's money that might be better spent elsewhere. When I set up a similar forum at the Office of the e-Envoy, it cost £40,000 in time, even with free Lotus Notes software and support from IBM. In the end, the Office gave up trying to deal with the volume of comments, complaints and suggestions and canned the project.
In the end, this isn't simply an open source issue; it's a money and imagination issue. Based on the comments from my own local portal, local government is still inclined to use the internet as a one-way publishing medium that keeps customers at a distance. Simply changing telephone numbers or correcting information online appears to involve massive administrative effort which moves at glacial speed.
Many councils, particularly those inside the reach of the M25, may have the resources, budget and will to experiment with online forum projects. But I suspect many more will simply carry on doing what they have always done, leaving local communities wondering whether they exist simply to pay larger and larger taxes and parking charges.
It may well be that this particular open source moment will pass most of them by.
Comments
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1. Steven Clift
I invite folks to visit the source of the eGovMonitor story for the full details on the Issues Forum project: http://e-democracy.org/uk
They swaped "communities" for council, because in practice the initial forums are citizen-based, but positioned to connect to local councils. While a council can use GroupServer, they or citizens in their community would be more likely to start a forum on the http://forums.E-Democracy.Org site - for exactly the reason you point out, cost to host and support your own server.
Anyway, check out our Guidebook, case study, and our multimedia on our model from Minnesota now taking hold especially well in Brighton & Hove.
2. Pat Cooper
Moores is right about one thing: government in general is lacking in imagination.
Governments have the opportunity to buy basically whatever they want, yet they let themselves be a slave to the Microsoft Monopoly or the siren call of Open Source.
No one, in the media particularly, talks of compromise or creative solutions that actually reflect the needs specific to each user or business, instead of what's offered by the big tech players. Why not stick with Windows 98 or XP, but run Open Source on your servers, MySQL for your database and WordPerfect on the desktop? Efficiency and low costs can be achieved in many different ways--it's a simple lack of imagination.
3. Keith Roker
This shows what happens when a private company is allowed to own an industrial standard. Its as if the metric system was private and we all had to buy nuts and bolts from the same firm. Having competing standards is madness. IBM opened the door (nearly said gates) to universal cheap computing by establishing standards which any manufacturer could use. Its now time to break the Microsoft monopoly by forcing them to licence other software firms to make products interchangeable with theirs.
4. Simon Bazley
The problem is synonymous with the boyancy of the industry as a whole; When the industry was boyant (late 1994-2002) lots of Useful Opensource projects emerged and lots of them were taken up and used, as the industry has taken a dive so has the number of new useful Opensource projects.
I firmly believe the next logical step will be for Expensive IT Projects such as those paid for by our taxes, to be well documented online, so other government departments and probably sme's with a half decenet Linux admin, can repeat the roll out without the large initial consultancy cost.
It'll never happen, but it has to be good for our economy as a whole if a government pays over the odds for a solution which we can all then benefit from.
Still sadly the long term view seems to have fallen out of polotics for the time being.
5. PutDown Pete
Lol, you Brits are funny.
Stop the world I wanna get on. Me, get on? No way, open source looks scary. Rich, very rich.
6. Aaron Trevena
40 grand for an online forum, free lotus notes and free support from IBM? How the hell did you waste that much money?
Even a decent High Availability setup isn't going to cost half of that and a customised online forum is something any small to medium consultancy can produce to a high standard for less than 15k including hosting.
7. Simon Moores
Yes but we are talking 2000 - 2001 and this was pretty new stuff then... connecting the Internet to Lotus Notes and making it work seamlessly!
8. Aaron Trevena
"Yes but we are talking 2000 - 2001 and this was pretty new stuff then... connecting the Internet to Lotus Notes and making it work seamlessly!"
Right, I did that on my undergrad industrial placement a couple of years earlier.
In the space of 12 months and on a salary of 11 grand I put together a large intranet using Lotus Notes mixed with LAMP, integrated logistics information from AS/400s, RS/6000s and even some mainframes using various middleware, and a whole lot more.
All this was years before you put a forum together in lotus notes. Even though Lotus Notes was a poor choice (even the shockingly awful cold fusion would have been better), that is a shockingly bad piece of work.
Good god.
9. anonymous
local government should show interest to get the technology down in there areas so that the society will develop and improve and save time a lot