Enterprise open source Toolkit

Government can't ignore open source any longer

Tags:
Government,
George Osborne,
Open Source

George Osborne, shadow chancellor

Published: 08 Mar 2007 14:17 GMT

...no one in the gold industry had ever done before: he published all the geographical data on his mine that his company had online, and challenged the world to do the prospecting for him.

Enticed by the offer of a prize, over 1,000 virtual prospectors submitted their thoughts. These included not just geologists, but mathematicians, physicists and computer systems analysts who brought unorthodox ways of thinking to a very traditional industry. In total, the online community identified deposits that ended up yielding $3 billion worth of gold.

Proctor & Gamble are taking a similar open-source approach to their research. On top of the 7,500 scientists they directly employ in the traditional manner, they connect with more than 90,000 other scientists who they don't employ, but through their InnoCentive network, they use to help solve their R&D problems.

And YouGov, whose chairman Peter Kellner is chairing this event, is an online polling company that uses the internet to pull together polling samples faster and cheaper than would otherwise have been possible.

These new collaborations are not just commercial. Genebank, the world's largest public database of genetic information, is the result of an open-source approach that is enabling free and open collaboration between scientists and companies all over the world.

How can this approach be harnessed in the public sector? We need to start by taking advantage of the collaborative forums that are emerging on the internet. If you have a query about Google, for instance, you can visit their online question-and-answer website to post a question.

And because everyone else's queries, and the responses to them, are published on the website, the chances are that your query will already have been asked, and answered, by other people. This saves on Google's resources, but also provides users with more information more quickly than if a team of experts had tried to second guess every question that could possibly be asked.

Similar collaborative approaches could be applied in government. The Patient Opinion website, a social enterprise set up by a Sheffield GP, is already demonstrating what can be achieved. Patients are using the website to post accounts of their experiences of the NHS — both positive and negative. These are then forwarded to the relevant hospital or clinic, which can respond, triggering "microconversations" about the quality of care and service that often result in changes being made.

The effect is to create a real-time exchange of qualitative data on public experience, from seemingly trivial issues like the lack of clear signs to bigger issues, like poor quality outpatient care. The direction of travel is clear. The government needs to get onboard.

Another way the government could harness an open-source approach is through the procurement of open-source software. Open-source software is software that's developed collectively by a community of developers, including individuals, universities and small and large firms from around the world. They build the product, suggest improvements, check the source code and critique each other's work. By this extraordinary and often unguided collaborative effort, they produce software that is then made available, often free of charge.

What is more, unlike traditional proprietary software, users can access the source code, making it possible for them to tailor the software to their needs and make constant iterative improvements. Not only is this a cost-effective way of designing software, but it's often faster and more effective, too.

Ever since I visited the headquarters of Mozilla in Palo Alto I have become a user of their open-source Firefox web browser. I am not alone. Almost 20 percent of online Europeans use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer.

There are plenty more examples of open source in practice. Take Linux, the fastest-growing operating system in the world. It's an open-source model that IBM has now based their new hardware around. The company has estimated that this decision has saved them around $1bn a year. They're not the only ones to have benefited through open-source software; Amazon has estimated that it has cut its technology spending by a quarter.

This explains why 95 percent of the Forbes Global 2000 companies will have open-source IT strategies by next year. Far-sighted governments are also taking advantage of this trend.

In Japan, the government is moving its entire payroll system over to an open-source platform. The switch is expected to cut operating costs by half. The Spanish region...