I think that's the underlying problem -- it's difficult to justify to the electorate why they're paying to improve services in other areas -- roughly analogous to explaining to shareholders why you're developing solutions that could be used by competitors, with no royalty.
My belief is that EDI could be used as a key, because that can give cost savings to the councils that use said EDI -- maybe the approach is to get the LGA (or another appropriate body) to develop standards where none already exist along similar lines to RFCs. If you were to take an example of planning applications, which I'm aware there is already some "electronic submission"; if a critical mass of councils were using the same EDI method for receiving them then tools could be built into the likes of AutoCAD; If there was a common EDI query interface, the open source community may choose to write tools that handle searching in a more consumer friendly form (*cough* planningalerts,com *cough*). It would also allow for better competition between suppliers of systems, as it could remove barriers for transition, removing any lock in to proprietary systems. If you were being really clever, you could accept drawings in SVG, which would allow changes between revisions to be more easily identified. Not sure the best way to evangelise such an approach though... 2009/4/8 Simon Roe <[email protected]>: > On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 8:51 PM, Steven Clift <[email protected]> wrote: > >> If I controlled the purse strings, I'd require a justification for not >> using/leveraging existing open source CMS platforms that have a >> demonstrated base. Or better yet, fund the creation of >> modules/plug-ins for a few CMSes based on a publicly crafted >> specification that also encourages those who host proprietary content >> systems for government to competitively add similar, perhaps >> interoperable/aggregatable features. > > Not quite the same, but there is an attempt at a GPL council CMS: > > http://www.aplaws.org.uk/project/laws.php > > It's horrid, and none of the councils are able to talk to each other > about common features they want made for it. Also, as far as I know > only one council has a technical person with commit access working for > them -- everyone else uses a contracted company to fork the project > and deal with the result of their miscommunication (merging forked > branches etc). > > Open source, in this case, made no difference, because the council a) > didn't talk to other councils and b) just paid someone else to do > everything for them. I don't think they even had access to their > branch, but even if they did it wouldn't have meant anything. > > -- > Help save the economy: > http://seriouschange.org.uk/ > > E: [email protected] > M: 07742079314 > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list [email protected] > Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: > https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public > _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
