April, 07 2004

Today I got in touch with my ‘inner web designer’ and whipped up some prototype user interfaces for a potential project my bosses have their eyes on, deadline being today.

It turns out that my ‘inner web designer’ inherited his sense of beauty and grace from a 19th century Welsh coal-miner. I used two animated GIFs—one of a beating cartoon heart. The pages only work on IE, maybe only IE 6. There is a stylesheet, but it looks like a C++ program. An obfuscated C++ program. Bleah.

I’m going home to take a shower.

Bespoke software written for Government should be Open Source.

Government software is built under the authority of our elected officials, and paid for with our taxes. In a very real sense, Government software belongs to us, the public. And if the software belongs to the public, why shouldn’t the public have access to the source?

I see four big benefits to Open Source Government:

• Open Government: the public has the option of checking that software is peforming functions correctly and fairly, and according to legislation, regulation and policy.

• Reuse within Goverment: while not all the software will be directly useful in other contexts, open source will promote reuse of common componentry and infrastructure.¹ The aim would be to lower costs over the long term. There would also be concrete benefits to the IT industry.

• Reuse in the wider community: open source allows others to benefit from the work of government programmers, contractors and consultants.

• Developer Accountability: the possibility of public scrutiny and subsequent ridicule promotes quality in the finished product, even though it may raise in the short term.

There are also some questions that need to be thought through carefully:

• Licensing: Should software be released under a strict license or put into the public domain?

• What to keep Closed: Obviously, some software should not be public—perhaps smugglers shouldn’t have access to the Customs Department profiling algorithms—but where should the line be drawn?

Getting started is another matter. Since there is no incentive to government departments to take on the additional cost and risk of open sourcing their software, Open Source Government would need to be introduced as policy. There are precedents for policies like this. In the IT arena, State and Federal governments have policies mandating website accessibility be accessible, and ‘encouraging’ departments to choose to outsource their IT.

Open Source Government is possible. Spread the word.

¹ I shudder to think how many different implementations of, say, a Postcode Lookup function there would be across Australian Government deparments.