An online notebook
Good news for all ScotGovCampers!
As well as Learning Pool sponsoring ScotGovCamp, we are hosting some pre-event drinks on Friday night in Edinburgh!
Kicking off at 6pm at the Apex International Hotel in the Grassmarket, it will be a great informal way to get everyone together before the event, getting all the introductions and stuff out of the way.
Learning Pool will be paying for a few rounds of drinks too, which is a bonus! Even if you can’t make the event on Saturday, feel free to pop in for a glass of pop and a natter – and invite colleagues along too, especially if the thought of spending a night in a bar chatting to a bunch of government geeks sounds like their kind of evening.
While I am at it, thanks as well to Firmstep and Huddle for putting their hands into their marketing pockets for sponsorship dosh.
Stephen O’Grady has a great post analysing where the open source software movement is in the Startup, Growth, Maturity or Decline model.
Why would commercial organizations willingly cede the fruits of their labor to a market that might include their competitors? Because for software that is non-differentiating, that is not a competitive advantage – which for most non-technology firms is virtually all of their software – it will cost more over the longer term to author software privately than it would publicly. Facebook and Twitter demonstrate this quite adequately (coverage), true, but it’s not just the web firms. We see it when a hosting company (Rackspace) and space agency (NASA) jointly author a cloud computing stack that neither intends to create a software sales business around. We see it when Lockheed Martin launches an open source social networking project. And so on.
None of these can be characterized as decisions driven by idealism or emotion; they are simply the most logical means of developing software for companies that aren’t in the business of selling software. Make no mistake: we’re seeing a resurgence of roll your own software (coverage). The difference this time around is that by sharing the code developed internally as open source, it becomes possible to amortize the development costs across multiple organizations with similar needs. Worst case, you have the opportunity to lower your costs of talent acquisition; this, presumably, is one of the justifications for Google sharing details on its MapReduce and Pregel processing approaches.
Open source is something I’ve been reading and thinking about a lot recently and the more you dig into it, the more complicated it can get.
With government policy focusing more and more on using open source solutions, I wonder whether the understanding is there amongst those making buying decisions about the various licenses and business models that exist. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
It does strike me though that it is easy for a supplier to claim to provide an open source solution when in fact they don’t.
The advantages of open sourcing for both the supplier and customer, as Stephen notes in his post, are huge. But this really isn’t as simple as just saying that open source software is cheaper, or indeed ‘open’- there are lots of factors here and the implications of taking decisions around open source are potentially significant.
More on this in future posts.
The Knowledge Hub is an ambitious project by Local Government Improvement and Development (what was the IDeA) to provide two main things: a new platform for the Communities of Practice to replace the rather clunky current one; and to provide a service for data sharing and hosting – a little like data.gov.uk but for local stuff.
Steve Dale, the architect of the incredibly successful Communities of Practice, is the guy behind the Knowledge Hub, ably assisted by luminaries of local gov 2.0 like Ingrid Koehler. It should be great.
I’ve embedded a video below which explains the Knowledge Hub in a practical sort of way.
The procurement process for the technology bit of the Knowledge Hub was recently completed and at a meeting of the steering group on Tuesday (27th July) we’ll get to find out who the winner is and what the finished thing might look like. My understanding is that the Knowledge Hub will then launch in the new year.
Learning Pool were delighted to be asked to produce the animation for the video above, and we think it has come out pretty well. If you think you have a use for something similar, do get in touch!
I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.
You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.
You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.
