open source

eDemocracy08 today

I will shortly be heading down to London to eDemocracy08, Headstar‘s annual shindig for anyone interested in how technology and democracy can be improved by one another.

I actually have some involvement at this year’s event, having being generously invited by those friendly folk at Delib to share a panel session with Chris Quigley, Gez Smith and Steph Gray talking open source. Here’s the skinny:

Open Source in e-Democracy – How good can it be if it’s free?

Chair: Chris Quigley, Director, Delib

  • Steph Gray, Head of Social Media, Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills
  • Gez Smith, Senior Consultant, Delib
  • Dave Briggs, Digital Enabler, DavePress Ltd

Over the last few years, UK e-Democracy has been characterised by small pockets of piloting and ‘innovation’, often to the exclusion of demonstrable impact and software sustainability. In contrast to this, the wider internet has seen an explosion of participative software, free to use and open to be redeveloped, integrated and customised to suit individual situations. This session explores the role of such open source software in e-democracy. Featuring perspectives from central government, local government and the private sector, the session will look at the benefits and drawbacks of the open source approach, the value of software vs knowledge, and what all this might mean for e-democracy in the future. In the spirit of open collaboration, it will also hopefully feature a good participative discussion too!

Now, if that doesn’t sound like something you would enjoy then you must be mental.

Before these things, I always struggle a bit to think of what I am going to say. Part of this is that I just don’t know in which direction the conversation is going to head, and so having something heavily prepared might mean I end up banging on irrelevantly and irrate everyone present. However, in an attempt to do at least some groundwork, I thought I would put my open source principles to the test and try crowd sourcing the topic with my buddies on Twitter.

I got some good stuff back:

  • podnosh @davebriggs open source lets you spend money on building community instead of wrestling with shitely restrictive software?
  • stevepurkiss @davebriggs 1.Dont give your freedoms away, make sure to use Free/Libre OSS (not just OSS). 2.Collaborate on projects. 3.Put something back.
  • peeebeee @davebriggs Could quote some anti-patterns re Sharepoint perhaps?
  • marxculture @davebriggs http://tinyurl.com/6f5uha [link to a story about the work done in Parliament on the Hansard prototype site, using OS technology such as OpenSolaris, MySQL, Ruby on Rails etc]
  • ssutherland @davebriggs OSS a good fit 4 public sector cos of vfm and likelihood of future proofing solutions. Sector still needs to grasp key OS issues
  • gavinwray @davebriggs How o s advocates can tackle attitude of ‘cheap/free must be low quality & unsupported; expensive & proprietary must be good’
  • waugaman @davebriggs COMPLETELY agree w @podnosh – also general OS community is wide/deep enough to allow 4 service/product of diff user/dev needs…eg diff in folks who use joomla v drupal or wordpress.com v .org
  • watfordgap @davebriggs and OS is a bit like twitter. Community of developers wanting to help fix problems and make code better for YOU
  • philoakley @davebriggs The promise of oss is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

I’ll try and work as much of this stuff in as I can. My own thoughts include:

  • Just because it’s free doesn’t mean it won’t cost you anything – using online stuff like OS blogging platforms such as WordPress, forums like phpBB or wikis like MediaWiki doesn’t mean that the project will be cost-free. No matter how open your platform, if you don’t commit resource to ongoing management and facilitation, it will fail
  • The difference between government deploying OS web software and desktop applications – the former is almost certainly easier to do
  • Taking an open source approach to working, whether in policy development or consultations, doesn’t mean someone else does the work for you. Linux has not many more than 160-odd active developers, OpenOffice.org just around 25. Millions of people use Wikipedia, but less than 4,000 are classed as very active contributors. WordPress has a large volunteer base, but there are four main developers who coordinate and validate the work of others

I’m sure more will occur to me over the course of today. Oh, and just to note – I wrote this post in WordPress, running Firefox on Ubuntu.

PollDaddyPress & Automattic reliance

Matt Mullenweg, the irritatingly youthful founder of WordPress, has announced that his company, Automattic, have purchased the internet polling service PollDaddy, and immediately integrated in into WordPress.com and made a plugin available for self-hosted WordPressers.

I took a secret trip to Sligo and put back a few pints with the team and we decided to make things work. They went to bed every night and woke up every morning thinking about polls and surveys, and were iterating at a great pace. By plugging into Automattic’s experience at creating internet-scale services and the distribution of WordPress.com, I knew we could take Polldaddy to an entirely new level in a relatively short amount of time.

It’s certainly interesting that Automattic are acquiring stuff at the moment in what are testing times for any company, let alone relatively young web startups. Especially when the whole WordPress platform is potentially reliant on this company to keep it on the right tracks, and to keep the development moving forward.

WordPress the platform is open source, which means that the code is available to anyone to use, modify and sell on for themselves – as long as they published their version under the same terms. However, much of the organising of the project, and the hosting of the websites, forums, bug trackers etc is done by Automattic, a company whose main motive, one must assume, is profit. Many other open source projects work in similar ways: much of the development of Linux has been done with the help of big companies like IBM and others, for example. But where a platform is so reliant, as I believe WordPress is, on one company to provide direction, does that company have an obligation to the people that use that code?

Now, I doubt very much that the amount of money that PollDaddy will have cost Automattic will have been that big a deal, and I am sure that Matt, Toni and the other Automattic guys would do anything deliberately to jeapordise their company. I’m just thinking hypothetically – do companies involved in open source have to be more risk-averse, because their failure could potentially damage a far wider group of people that just specific clients.

Or for those using open source, is it a case of downloaders beware?

Software Freedom Day

Next Saturday (September 20th) is Software Freedom Day:

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere!

There are various get togethers happening around the world to celebrate – here are all the UK ones. If you’d like to know more about free software, this video from Stephen Fry is a pretty nice start:

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Other things you might like to do include tracking down your local Linux User Group – who can help and advise you on any issues you are having – and actually installing some open source software on your computer. Here’s some quick suggestions:

How else could you support or celebrate software freedom day?

Free software, or just go online?

Following some of the points made on my post about Kubuntu and Linux yesterday, I’ve been wondering a bit more about free software and how it might help people make the most of their equipment.

After all, software is expensive stuff. One of the great things about Kubuntu is that if I want a piece of software to a job, say editing graphics, all I have to do is call up the application manager, type in ‘graphics’ and it comes  up with a list of applications I can download and use straight away.

Things aren’t quite so easy with the Mac, of course, but at least that comes preloaded with the iLife suite, which means you can pretty much get on with most things out of the box.

Poor old Windows users are of course left behind in this. They don’t have any decent software pre-installed, by and large, and nor do they have access to a great open source application manager like Kubuntu comes with.

Having said that, an awful lot of the best open source apps are available for Windows users as well as Linux. But they are spread about on their own websites – though many are downloadable from sites like SourceForge – and how is the average user supposed to know they are there? If I want to create a podcast on my PC and need an audio editor, how do I know that Audacity is the package I want?

A great way of tackling this would be to create a simple CD, with all the main open source packages that people might want to use on a regular basis. You could burn and print a load to give away, and maybe make the ISO downloadable from a website.

Some of the software I would include on such a CD would be:

All of which are freely available (and more importantly, distributable) for Windows users.

But then… is this really the right way to go? In the age of Web 2.0, cloud computing, Google Docs and Zoho, do we really want to encourage people to be installing loads of desktop software? Or should we just point them to where they can download FireFox, and then giving them a list of bookmarks?

Maybe it depends on things like web connection speeds. Perhaps desktop software works better for some people than others

I’d be interested to hear what others think. Would a CD with preselected, quality open source software really make a difference to the way people use their PCs? Or should we be encouraging folk to use online tools, and to compute in the cloud?

The need for organisation

Interesting post from MJ Ray on the need for organisation – which perhaps busts the myth that open source software development is a perfect model to follow for other types of groups:

Are free software users particularly bad at the basics of running an interest society (like welcoming and expiring members, calling meetings, publishing routine communications, and so on), have I been spoiled by cooperatives with their friendly Member Services departments or secretariats, or what? Is this why so many free software orgs seem to include self-perpetuating leadership groups? Is this a serious problem if, as reported, Software Development is a Team Sport [etbe]? Are there fully-working free software mass participation groups out there?

I feel a lot of these problems are caused by attempting to order our inherently entropy-filled world completely and insisting everything follows petty rules, such as refusing to answer a question because the “wrong” member asked it. The world will not become less random just because hackers try to impose arbitrary rules. Sometimes it’s good to put down minimum standards (because calling zero-day meetings is a mostly-avoidable way of excluding some members) but it will always be a poor alternative to trying to do the best you can for others.

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