Open source gov

Last week, the Cabinet Office published a new action plan for government and open source, to level the playing field when it comes to procuring software.

So we consider that the time is now right to build on our record of fairness and achievement and to take further positive action to ensure that Open Source products are fully and fairly considered throughout government IT; to ensure that we specify our requirements and publish our data in terms of Open Standards; and that we seek the same degree of flexibility in our commercial relationships with proprietary software suppliers as are inherent in the open source world.

Excellent stuff. There is a Netvibes dashboard set up to help monitor what is being said online, some of which is a little cynical and critical. I tend to prefer to be relentlessly positive.

Anyway, the situation with open source is a little similar to that of social web stuff, in that knowledge about it, and its possibilities, are somewhat limited. We need open source digital mentors!

Alternatively, we just need a wiki.

OpenSourceGov

OpenSourceGov is a simple MediaWiki site which aims to collect together all the information a civil servant might ever want to know about open source and the options it makes available. Hopefully it will soon be able to answer questions like:

  • Which licence should a government open source project be published under>
  • What is the best open source content management system to use for which purpose?
  • Where are the suppliers of open source solutions?

As well as many others.

Please do visit the wiki, and make use of the (currently limited) information on there. Even better, register for an account and add or edit some stuff you know about and share it with everyone else!

Bookmarks for February 26th through March 3rd

Stuff I have bookmarked for February 26th through March 3rd:

  • Getting Started: gadgets.* API – Gadgets – Google Code – Via @lesteph – create Google Gadgets to go on things like iGoogle pages.
  • The Times & CUNY (and others) go hyperlocal « BuzzMachine – "The New York Times is about to announce that it is starting a hyperlocal product called The Local working with our students at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism."
  • "Magazeen": Free Magazine-Look WordPress Theme – '“We’ve created the Magazeen theme to try and pump as much style and functionality into a WordPress theme to give people something they might not expect from their standard WordPress theme. There really is very few limits to what WordPress handle, so we’ve built in a lot of custom features and options to give people a little taste of what is possible, and how some small functionality tweaks can make a huge difference to the overall experience of browsing a blog. On top of that we’ve wrapped all that functionality up in a really cool and modern theme, with nice big title fonts, and a stylish colour scheme."
  • Piwik – Web analytics – Open source – "Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software program. It provides you with detailed reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages…"
  • WordPress Wiki Plugin – "This Plugin will transform WordPress into a custom knowledge Base application to power your documentation needs"

It isn’t just government…

…that is struggling with some of this stuff.

Take a look at Phil Bradley’s marvellous post, railing against the attitudes of CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals):

The next section really did make my jaw drop. “In terms of “official” activity, cyber life is just like real like (sic) – if it happens in a CILIP-sanctioned space, it’s official; if it happens down the pub or in someone else’s space, it isn’t.” This is a classic ‘ownership’ issue – if we say it’s real then it’s real, and if we say it isn’t real, then it’s not. If I’m in a CILIP sanctioned space (whatever that is!) do my words and arguments take on more meaning than if I’m not? Or perhaps I need to have an official CILIP representative to add some gravitas to my comments? We don’t live in a world when the organization or PR department can control the message any longer – things have moved on, and the webpage/site, while important, is no longer the sole place in which activity can take place.

Looks like another good example for David’s (and others) membership project.

Remind us of your views, again?

I wrote a little while back about a fairly terrible website being used by Cambridgeshire’s Transport Commission to consult people on their views.

Cambridge News now reports:

A PROBE into Cambridgeshire’s transport crisis – including the idea of a congestion charge for Cambridge – has been hit by a technical blunder.

The chairman of the Cambridgeshire Transport Commission, Sir Brian Briscoe, has revealed the commission’s website has been affected by “initial teething problems”.

The result is that some of the responses to the commission’s request for people’s views on how to tackle the traffic issue have been lost.

People are now being contacted to resubmit their views. Let’s hope they can be bothered.

Oh dear oh dear. I found out that this website cost the sum of £2,990 to produce. Now, that might not sound like a huge amount, but for a microsite like this it’s a sizable budget. What the Transport Commission got for their money was – frankly – piss poor, and it now turns out that it doesn’t even work properly.

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