On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 10:12 PM, Arjuna Rao Chavala <[email protected]>wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 9:03 PM, Terence Monteiro <[email protected]>wrote: > >> As Vickram and Krishnakant have pointed out, I believe this is more than >> just a technical problem. This is really a multifaceted issue in the long >> term, and I think we should handle this as such. Our Government may have an >> official policy on open document standards, but it seems to lack either the >> knowledge or the will to bring the benefits of this policy to people. I >> think we need to send them a detailed report which: >> >> 1. Asserts the importance of providing support for >> LibreOffice/OpenOffice: talks about licencing issues of MS Office, the >> availability of OpenOffice/LibreOffice for all platforms. I'm sure there >> are >> more than a few misconceptions about OpenOffice/LibreOffice that we need >> to >> tackle. >> 2. Convinces them that a switch to OO/LO is purely in the public >> interest, and not of any other parties, and is the best for the people, >> reaching a wider audience (including Windows users). >> 3. Shows them the difficulty in migrating from MS Excel on a sustained >> basis. >> 4. Shows them the feasibility of developing/maintaining an OO/LO based >> solution. >> >> It would help to identify their service provider for these utilities and > train/orient them to provide an equivalent version on OO/LO. > +1. However, rather than find ourselves engaged in tedious detective work, trying to identify who has won a tender/award to do some specific project for the government, it is more sensible for the government to prequalify bidders on the basis of their ability (staffing/training/proven expertise) to generate dynamic solutions that do not force the end-user (citizens, mostly, but the solutions being tendered may include all kinds of things like ticketing, and indeed, tendering itself) to use proprietary software. I am not expert to agree that some client-side application is always needed (ref my example of the Sales Tax software I had seen in work) when designing such solutions, but if this is so, then it probably makes sense for volunteers to join the OO/LO project, and develop some feature within that environment that will generate a webpage, or at least a working html tabular form, from a working spreadsheet. This way, when the solution is updated (due to changing rates, or new rules or for whatever reason: it is very clear from the Income tax case that such changes are almost certain to be needed every single year), it is really easy for the outsource company, or even the in-house staff, to rapidly create a new page to replace the irrelevant one. > > >> I will send a detailed report on this, especially the 3rd point soon. An >> alternative, radical solution for ITR and Sales Tax would be to have >> everything online - use a online application with Javascript and server side >> scripting (e.g PHP) to do the work of validation and computation. However, >> this seems too much of a switch, requiring a different skill set from the MS >> Excel solutions. Also, it may be more burdensome on the server - probably we >> all know of government sites going down due to overload. So an Open document >> solution seems the path of least resistance technically speaking. Meanwhile, >> do continue the ideas/suggestions. >> >> It does seem that the government is not well placed to provide servers of the necessary robustness to keep operating under conditions of heavy demand. This needs to be brought to their attention in the same note, as obviously, it is smarter and more efficient to be able to ensure that end-users are able to rely on the availability of an online solution. Architecturally, they seem to have adopted a centralised and fundamentally weaker approach. > > Private companies are already providing web based solution for free, though > they may be using MS technologies at the backend. > example: https://www.investmentyogi.com/ > > If the solution back-ends on to the government web site, does it not mean that the government server has to be operational reliably? But even so, in theory at least, it makes perfect sense for any number of service providers, operating on whatever business model they individually find practical, to ease the load on the central server. Is there something in the design approach (the use of a client-side application) that makes this more feasible? Would designing a fully web-enabled application prevent the growth of independent small businesses in this service? -- Vickram Fool On The Hill <http://communicall.wordpress.com>
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