Making Government Transparent and Accountable
The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Underlying all of our efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the public's confidence in government
The Sunlight Foundation Blog
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The U.K. Goes Open Source
Here is some big news (a couple days late)! United Kingdom Cabinet Office Minister (for digital engagement) and Member of Parliament Tom Watson, in a statement released a day or so ago, said the British government will accelerate the use of open source software in its public services. The government will now place open source software on a level playing field with proprietary software such as Windows, and they’ll adopt open source software “when it delivers best value for money.” This is timely as the the Obama Administration begins to figure out how to use technology to reboot our government.
Whenever possible, the government has decided to avoid proprietary software for public services. The government will require its agencies to adopt open source software when “there is no significant overall cost difference between open and non-open source products” because of its “inherent flexibility.” In a report on the announcement, the BBC quotes open source advocates as saying the shift from proprietary standards could save the government up to £600 million a year.
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Doc Searls Interviews Sunlight’s Greg Elin
Doc Searls, author and Senior Editor of the blog Linux Journal, interviews Sunlight’s Greg Elin in an article about open source in politics and government. Here are the choice parts from Greg describing Sunlight’s work, the data that backs it up, and the future of it all:
Almost all of our projects and funded projects are open source — though sometimes our code is a bit hacked so it takes a while to release it. Nearly every group I know is completely invested in open source: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache… The frameworks are being rapidly adopted: Rails, Django, Symfony…
The work I’m most interested in these days is dynamic-scripting — what I think about as “flow-and-go” data sets instead of what Jeff Jonas coined as “rack-and-stack” data sets. Dynamic scripting is Unix pipes! That is, every application does input and output. We leave the world of databases-make-reports and enter the world of RSS-flows-in and RSS-flows-out.
Two examples of flow. A Sunlight database, LouisDB.com, scrapes the Congressional Daily Record daily, transforming it into XML. Garrett Schure (Sunlight Labs developer) and Josh Ruihley did a word count algorithm on the Congressional Record to come up with Congress’ “Word of the Day” and the microsite http://capitolwords.org — which goes back to 2001 and has an RSS feed, API, and a widget people can put on their site. Louisdb.com makes it easier to search the Congressional Record — and now there’s a script boiling it down into tweetable content that others can use, too. Second example, from MySociety: TheyWorkForYou. It provides profiles of what Members are doing in Parliament by parsing the Parliament’s daily record and votes. Lastly, many sites rely on the work of Josh Tauber’s http://govtrack.us b/c. Josh scrapes all sorts of data on bills in Congress and transforms it into XML. Josh’s data is open and so also is his code. It’s a tremendous contribution.
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Programmers and technologists who grew up with the web and with open source have been entering the political and e-government arena the past several years bringing with them the tools and practices of open source and Web 2.0. They are collaborating with — and sometimes competing with — existing technologists who were often activists who learned spreadsheets and databases and desktop publishing and then the web to communicate their message. So we are seeing a geek-i-fication of everything from campaigns to good government groups to government itself. More open source. More frameworks. More collaborative communication among individual developers. It’s uneven, it’s bumpy, but it is definitely happening. The tipping point has occurred now in politics and government — the question remains only where the tree is going to land.
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Open Source South Africa
Last fall, the government of South Africa announced that it was adopting Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Open Document format (ODF) as official standards for government communications. South Africa’s moves are adding further momentum to the global trend among governments and other institutions to adopt open standards. South Africa joined such countries as Brazil, China, Spain, India and Malaysia, as well as municipal and regional governments in other countries (Massachusetts and New York here in the states), in using open source as a way to encourage efficiency and effectiveness of governance, to cut IT costs, foster the development and competitiveness of their national software industries, and as means to compete worldwide.
Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, writing at his commonspace blog, links to audio of a talk given by Aslam Raffee, chairperson of the South African government’s OSS working group. Raffee was speaking at last week’s Open Everything Cape Town event where he gave an update on the transformation and discussed the challenges that they have encountered. “We’ve done very well in terms of setting policy, but very poorly at implementation,” he said. “We’ve got to fix that.” Surman summarized by saying the government is on track to have all departments have ODF capability by the end of the year; Microsoft is integrating ODF into Word; and the government’s document management is likely to be open source.
