Do any readers of this list have experience helping a city, particularly a mid-sized US city, begin to transition from proprietary software systems to libre systems? If so, I would be grateful to hear your experience and advice.
I live in Berkeley California, and will soon be discussing libre software with some city officials. Currently, Berkeley exclusively uses proprietary software in its offices. Elected officials use a corporate email service with poor privacy policies to keep in contact with constituents. City Council meetings and other important meetings are live streamed, but the format requires recent versions of flash, and the vendor who provides the streaming service both has poor privacy policies, and refuses to support formats libre viewers can handle. Most immediately, I will try to help one elected official adopt libre, and more privacy-respecting solutions to keeping in contact with constituents. I'm not sure what direction to prioritize beyond that. Does anyone have related experience or suggestions? Thanks, -t Thomas Lord [email protected] Berkeley, CA USA p.s.: Perhaps of relevant interest is this ordinance from the Berkeley Municipal Code, adopted in 2011. It provides both constraints and support for adapting libre software: 2.06.170 Technology standards. A. To provide for the accessibility of electronic information on the City’s website, the City shall: 1. Meet or exceed the guidelines for accessibility specified by the Federal General Services Administration pursuant to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (29 U.S.C. 794d) as it may be amended from time to time. 2. When feasible within resource constraints, use open, non-proprietary, standards-based data formats on public facing information systems. When platform-specific formats must be used, provide an alternate format or a viewer to consume the file types. 3. Make audio and video available for both download and streaming using open, cross-platform, standards-based formats, accessible by a broad range of computer operating systems and portable devices. 4. When feasible within resource constraints, avoid web content types that are not compatible across browsers (such as Flash). 5. Make substantive website changes trackable in an open, cross-platform, standards-based journal format (such as RSS). B. Nothing in this Section shall require programming a computer to respond to a request for information or to release information that would violate a licensing agreement or copyright law. (Ord. 7166-NS § 1 (part), 2011) _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
