Re: [sheflug] government open source policy

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 09:30 +0000, David Willington wrote:
> Does anyone know what the relationship is between government policy and
> a public body's duties to it. I'm thinking specifically of the two below
> 
> http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemasstandards/egif_document.asp?docnum=949
> 
> http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/policydocs/policydocs_document.asp?docnum=905&topic=61&topictitle=Open+Source+Software+Policy+&subjecttitle=Open+Source+Software
> 
> If I've understood them correctly it's government policy for publicly
> funded bodies to use open standards in document exchange and to consider
> open source solutions when getting IT resources but this doesn't happen.

You're basically right. The e-Gif standard is much more important than
the "open source policy", which essentially says nothing (it says "open
source" should be considered on a "value for money basis" - the
alternative, that it not be considered, would be obviously illegal). So,
you might have a case if a school refused to consider a solution on the
basis that it was free software, but otherwise the policy is
ineffectual.

e-Gif is essentially mandated, but it's only for service provision
(e.g., "Council tax online", that kind of thing) - it doesn't apply to
any and all websites produced by public bodies:
        
        "Does the e-GIF Apply to New & Legacy systems?
        
        Any new systems procured by the public sector must apply a test
        to the system.  The test is "does this system have an
        interaction with citizens, other public sector organisations, or
        a private sector organisation?" If the answer is "yes", that
        interaction must then use the appropriate e-GIF standards."

In the case of VLEs and school websites, to the extent that e-Gif
applies at all (which I think might be debatable), it only mandates
HTTP/HTML, and says nothing about how data is stored etc. It's only
concerned with the interaction.

This is an important area, it would be interesting to hear more about
the problems you're encountering.

Cheers,

Alex.


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