Nigel McFarlane

Open Source: Safer at any Speed?

Written by admin on April 28, 2009

Government agencies and utilities implement government policy. The tumultuous development of ICT technology in the late 20th century has been a massive and externally-driven digestion activity for such organisations. This article argues that Open Source technology is rather different from past shrink-wrapped technology advancements. It is assistive rather than disruptive to the stable management of public concerns both inside and outside government organisations.

Your Mileage Certainly Does Vary

In technology discussions, particularly those mediated by USENET, “Your Mileage May Vary” (YMMV) is an oft-quoted disclaimer when advice or observations are offered to peers. It means: no two circumstances are alike – my experience is no absolute forecast of what your experience may be. Indeed, your experience may be entirely different. No better disclaimer than YMMV can possibly exist for government adoption of ICT technology, which is provided by suppliers whose goals are utterly different to those of government.

The Supplier/Government Sponsor relationship in ICT is flooded with meaning driven from the supply end of the partnership. Suppliers have relatively straightforward and tractable performance metrics: make money, preferably as profitably as possible. Sponsors, on the other hand, often have intractable or at least impressively difficult performance metrics: poverty, unemployment, health, security, local government, international trade, culture, community, public infrastructure. The ICT industry and all its toys have, in the late 20th century, been a hammer blow to government organisations, a blow driven by the conceiving and packaging of software in terms framed to meet supplier metrics. In turn, such organisations have been forced to spend resources absorbing the impact of the ICT blow (”implementing”, “upgrading”, “replacing”), rather than on their core performance goals. The circle of justification (fortunately with some validity) states that efficiencies, effectiveness, community access and industry benefits are the consequent benefits to core goals. These benefits are delivered by the indirect strategies required to absorb the distortions created by the ICT blow. As an example: rather than more ramps and more customer service, build a Web site and an IVR system with accessibility ticks. That will be strategic support for disabled clients, a solution we are happy with because it fits with the wrestling we have to do to get our Web site management strategy in place.

The mileage public organisations have derived from software advancements has, however, certainly varied; witness the many publically funded ICT projects around the globe that have yielded a fraction or none of their original intent. Even when ICT technology is not directly adopted, the consequences for government organisations can remain far reaching. Nowhere is this more evident than in the legislature, which in the early 21st century has reeled and reacted under the hammer blow of escalating media technology and the digital rights management “problems” thus revealed. Choruses of “it won’t work” from academics and others do nothing to assist government functionaries with their fundamental problems of finding focus and implementing policy as the technology ground shakes and sways.

We tend to forget that it is not MP3s or Kazaa that are newly destroying the recording industry; the genie began squeezing out of that bottle the second a vinyl record master was used to duplicate music for the consumer’s pleasure. The DRM hammer blow is just an escalating supplier concern over a supplier metric – profit – that is forced on a specific government function, in this case, the legislature. The legislature might care, but it also probably has better things to do, like addressing drug networks and crimes of violence.