Category: eGovernment

David Fletcher points to the new OASIS e-Government TC, founded by John Borras of the e-Envoy in London.

I think our agency wants to join, but I am not sure whom we’ll send.

(I’d hoped to be blogging along while in Washington, but never got around to it; next time, Tony, we need a conference place with wifi!)

IDGs (and Infoworlds) top news story today: Open source debate heats up at conference. The conference they talk about (but for some reason don’t name) is the eGovOS conference in Washington, which ran this week.

The conference has confirmed to me that I’m all for open source. Especially for the developing world, but also for the so-called developed world. Open source is a cornerstone in the globalisation process, basically. Bruno Lanvin of Infodev closed the conference by concluding that open source is about giving the developing world a fighting chance.

The key is to create a level playing field, not only for the various software vendors on our markets, but also at a metalevel, between ideas and concepts, emering and consolidated technologies, and big and small players.

Bruce Perens’ talk was excellent and right to the point:

Bob, if you’re going to call for choice and fairness, it should
be a sincere call, not a sham. Don’t put on a program that calls
interoperability a too-expensive option. Don’t claim that keeping
software patents out of standards and interfaces hurts the little guy
when it does just the opposite.

Bob is of course Bob Kramer, the executive director and vice president of public policy for CompTIA, Initiative for Software Choice which I wrote about earlier.

Although the Perens-Kramer-et al panel was an absolute hit, there were generally good and interesting contributions, from literally all over the world. Here a but a few intersting cases:

• Rhode Island Rules and Regulations of Procedure offering a Rules Tracker giving users advanced personalisation features; backend system to be GPL’ed.


• http://www.oss.gov.za / is an excellent resource!


• …

In a few hours, I’ll be on a plane to Washington, where I’ll spend the next week, hopefully staying clear of the sniper :-<

The Open Source: A Case for e-Government conference is going to be great. It’s going to be huge too, Tony Stanco of the Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute (CSPRI) of The George Washington University just told me. Tony has been working on preparing the conference for months now, and has done a tremendous job. I’m quite proud that it was I who talked Tony into this whole venture, when we met in Spring in Washington. I’m also very proud to be co-organiser via GOL-IN and grateful to the sponsors for supporting this; it is now official that IBM, Redhat and Devis are sponsors.

On Thursday morning, just after keynote speaker Congressman Rick Boucher (D- Virginia), I’ll be moderator of the panel titled “Open Source Issues in Europe“, which will include at least:

• Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study (FLOSS) (art)
  
• Philippe Aigrain (European Commission) (art)
  
• Joseph Dal Molin (WorldVistaA)
  
• Irene Andersson (Swedish Agency for Public Management)

And maybe a surprise guest. Either way, it’s a real power-panel we got here, and I look forward to the debates.

Technology allowing me, I intend to blog the conference. Anyone else doing so?

Thanks to the good people at the Danish Embassy, I not only have the conference to look forward, but also have a great programme for Tuesday, where I’m having three great meetings: I’m meeting Mark Forman, Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget for E-government and Information technology, OMB; George Brundage, Chief Enterprise Architect, Treasury Office of Information Technology Policy and Strategy; and Robert Haycock, Acting Manager, Federal Enterprise Architecture – Program Management Office, OMB.

Today, the Danish Board of Technology published a report called Open Source Software in eGovernment which made headlines in national media, for example (the links are all in Danish):

• Microsoft koster staten milliarder – Microsoft costs the state billions(Politiken)
  
• Drop Microsoft og spar milliarder – Drop Micosoft and save billions (DR)
  
• Microsoft: Forkerte tal om open source – Microsoft: Wrong number about open source (Jyllands-Posten)
  
• Drop Bill – og spar milliarder – Drop Bill – and save billions (Berlingske Tidende)
  
• Staten kan spare milliarder på open source – The state can save billions on open source (ComputerWorld)
  
• Politisk flertal for mere open source – Political majority for more open source (ComputerWorld)

The report, made by an expert working group, claims that the government could save a huge amount of money if we move public IT-systems to open source, but also points out that there are many pittfalls and uncertainties.

Our minister of science, technology and innovation, Helge Sander, yesterday announced that we will start an open consultation process about software policy and open source software in particular. His press release said: (my translation)

“The [Danish] Government has increased the speed of digitising the public sector. It is important for us to have open and thorough deliberations about the use of Open Source Software in government. Our aim is to ensure free competition in delivering effecient and cheap software products to the administration. We need to assess cost price; quality; implementation costs; user training; and continuous development costs.”

So, we have been busy in the office today, preparing and opening a new thematic website for online deliberations about software policy and open source. It is open now. I’ll create an English forum too, if anyone wants to discuss with us. Let me know.

The Green Paper is in Danish only. On popular demand, we may choose to translate it to English, but for now we want to invite our international collegues for open deliberations about architecture policies around the world. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

For these deliberations, we have created a web forum with a number of themes:

• What is the domain? What are we talking about? FEA or e-GIF?
  
• What is a good architecture policy?
  
• eGovernment as urban planning
  
• Where are the best practices?
  
• What is a service-oriented architecture?
  
• Which standards are we talking about?
  
• …

Join the deliberations! Anyone interested in the themes are welcome to participate. Registration is required (free).

GovTalk.gov.uk has announced eGIF 4.1:

Version 4.1 of e-GIF Part Two is now up on GovTalk for a six week consultation period from Monday, 16th September to Friday, 25th October. Please post your comments directly on the site or, if you have difficulties doing so, email them to GovTalk (link to: mailto:govtalk.gov.uk)

I had difficulties finding out how to post directly on the site, and found no trace of anyone else having done so. I wanted to alert someone about the bad email link, and found an contact email address in the Contact Us section. That mail bounced!

Oh well.

Nonetheless, the e-GIF 4.1 is required reading. I’ve copied some central sections and made a few comments …

(more…)

Phil Windley writes about Enterprise Architectures:

… Perhaps, we should require agencies to have an enterprise architecture and to link funding to it in the same way that OMB has for Federal agencies?  The larger question is: how do we make the IT planning process useful and relevant?

The OMB-approach to FEA has been drawing some attention in Denmark, and I hope to visit OMB next month, when I’m in Washington, to learn more.

On 30 September, we have arranged a conference to be held here in Copenhagen, on the theme of IT-architecture in government. As the organiser, I am very safisfied with the final programme, although I initially had some other plans (next time, Phil, Mark, Knut!). The programme includes 4 Danish stories and one foreign case, as well as two architecture analysts, Kim Bjørn Nielsen from Gartner Group and Brian Burke from META Group.

On the analysts, I have a pretty good idea of what they’re going to say. Much the same, in many ways, but with different focuses. While Gartner emphasises the why’s, META will do the how’s. My agency is not (yet?) a client with any of these analysts. I’m not sure how much value-for-money we’d get from a membership – I’ve always found it somewhat absurd to pay $5000 for a report.

Mike Krus of NewsIsFree.com is great. When I asked him about some good feeds relating to e-government, he offered to build some new feeds, and went ahead and did it. Thanks Mike!!

My eGovNews portal experiment now offers a very comprehensive news service. Drupal actually seems to do a quite nice job there.

My Drupal wishlist:
* Search current news
* Create xml feeds for bundles

Any cheap developers out there?

I’ve been working on a new news service, dedicated to aggregating and syndicating news about e-government. Sadly, there are very few relevant feeds out there, but at least there are more than there were a year or two ago, when I started looking at these isssues.

Most of the feeds I use are scraped feeds, and I am not sure all of them are authenticated by the publishers. I am yet to find governmental websites that use the fine, little orange button indicating an XML feed.

Join our new mailinglist OPENSOURCE@LISTSERV.GOV.DK about Open Source in eGovernment.