Re: [sheflug] government open source policy

[David Willington <david.willington [at] xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 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.
Thanks for all that - definitely a sensible answer! I'm not having any
 specific problems apart from the general one of the school not having
 heard of open source. I've convinced the IT department and head of IT
 that it's going to provide a good solution, certainly better and cheaper than what
 they've got at the moment so things are going well there. 

Does the eGIF mean that public bodies shouldn't send me word documents?
It's an academic question of course as they do and I don't have any
problems with them, but is it accurate to say that according to eGIF
they shouldn't do?  It's the sort of information that it can be useful
to have up your sleeve.

All the best

David
> Cheers,
> 
> Alex.
> 
> 
> ___________________________________________________________________
> 
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> 
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