This is interesting, a while back I signed a Number 10 e-petition that said;
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ask the Communities Secretary to require that all software produced by councils under the Timely Information to Citizens project be released under an open source licence.
It went on to say in the further information section;
…as citizens we cannot and do not support this substantial sum of public money being spent to create private, proprietary software.
Spot on really, it’s one of the biggest losses of the last five years of e-democracy in this country that many millions of pounds of public money have been spent on private suppliers developing private software for resale.
Now there’s obviously a limit to how far this extends. If a public sector organisation wants to give a private sector company money for supplying software to them, that’s all well and good, just as if they gave a private sector company money for supplying any other goods and services.
But when the government is giving money for the development of approaches that are meant to be pilots that then spread out across other authorities, then the furtherance of that pilot is not helped by essentially handing free grants to the private sector, massively distorting the notion of competition.
Interestingly, as government money has fallen away over the last couple of years, european money has become the next big cash cow for this sort of approach, with lots of knowing nods and winks around about how ‘lucrative’ european pilot funding can be.
So, what did the government have to say in response to this petition? Well…
The Government supports the principle that, where new software is being developed by the Timely Information to Citizens pilots, this should wherever possible be released under open source licence and available for use by other local authorities.
For many of the Timely Information to Citizens pilots, the focus is not on new software, but on how existing tools and techniques can be used to bring information together and present it in more useful and accessible ways. Several of the projects will utilise existing open source software to create new information sources and channels, and will share their experiences of doing so with other authorities.
Where the pilots will result in new software tools, ownership and intellectual property rights will usually remain with the individual local authorities. However, most of the authorities concerned have already made a commitment to make these tools available as open source software, or for use by their partner organisations, and we are working to secure the commitment of the remaining.
Interesting then that projects like these are finally looking to reuse existing tools, rather than develop everything from scratch once again. It’s a reasonable commitment to open source too, but you get the impression that the stable door’s being shut after the horse has bolted with this project.
A pity in a way, but still a response in the right direction. Hopefully petitions like this will help keep the pressure up to make sure that any benefits of e-government and e-participation pilots are easily shared across to those who need them.
