[ubuntu-uk] public services

[john beddard]

Yes Alan,

Successful products/ developments today are customer inclusive.
Including them at the LoCo level is a good idea. Although how skilfully
this can be done requires some consideration. 

My experience is that local government (Councils) are desperate to
discover and become a part of the technology/ internet scene and learn
how it works. Having invested largely in other now declining sectors
over the past 20 years, for example retail. The emphasis is shifting
back towards a 'skills based' rather than a consumer-based economy.

My sense is that social enterprise would provide the most interested
people. Since their approach is similar to that of the open-source
community. Plus the fact they already have a 'change-mindset.'In wanting
to serve the community with ideas that originally came from a minority
base : like Ubuntu.

John

On Sun, 2011-06-26 at 10:01 +0100, Alan Bell wrote:
> On 25/06/11 11:45, Yorvyk wrote:
> > On Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:24:51 +0100
> > Carlos Ferreira<carlosemferreira at gmail.com>  wrote:
> >
> >> The UK team should be talking to Universities and other public services,
> >> doing advocacy and trying to figure out what the obstacles to the adoption
> >> of free software are, and how they can be overcome. In fact, it's something
> >> I'd like to do myself.
> >>
> > The problem with this idea is that you have to find somebody with influence who is willing to listen to some oik that's just wandered in off the street and is telling them their IT strategy is wrong.  That's how it was described to me by a senior IT bod at a council.  His suggestion was that Canonical need to be doing this sort of thing with professional 'sales' people.
> they do, we sometimes work with them. There are several consultancy 
> companies working with local governments and at national level to 
> promote and advocate software freedom. I am involved in some of this and 
> hope to give a more wide ranging update on it in a few weeks.
> >   Also the philosophy of Open Source doesn't really wash,  what’s needed is numbers in Pounds Stirling.
> Somewhat true, but vendor lock in is a bit of a driver. A lot of the 
> standard Free Software arguments don't really apply at government level.
> "you can adapt the software to your needs" - "yeah, we just pay them to 
> do that"
> "what if your requirements are not on the vendor's roadmap" - "we tell 
> them what their roadmap is and they do it"
> "what if the vendor goes out of business?" - "nobody goes out of 
> business if they are trading with us"
> "what if you want to audit the source code to see what it does?" - "we 
> demand to see it and they let us"
> 
> so they actually do understand and value the benefits of software 
> freedom, they just are used to paying for most of it. Economic arguments 
> have some traction, freedom to reuse software is of value, freedom from 
> having to count users for license compliance is of value.
> 
> Anyhow, back to the point. The stuff we should be doing as a LoCo is 
> providing a community for the public and private sector to join. With 
> community support there is no helper/helpee distinction, and I don't 
> want to create one, it is a user group that shares technical support 
> knowledge and helps each other, not a technical support service. The 
> public sector at the moment has a real lack of community understanding, 
> they are used to, and comfortable with, a customer/vendor relationship. 
> The main failing I see at the moment is a tendency in their open source 
> strategies to attempt to treat "the Open Source community" as a 
> supplier, I don't want them to procure stuff from the community. I want 
> them to join and be part of the community.
> 
> Alan.
>