Archive for the 'Strategy and Policy' Category

The ÆGIS 1st Pan European open accessibility Workshop

Published by stevelee on June 12, 2009 in Software, Development, Accessibility, Strategy and Policy, Standards and Community. 0 Comments

To be honest I’m enthusiastic about the potential of the European ÆGIS project which launched last week. I see the blend of open source and accessibility, open accessibility, as having the potential to provide the most appropriate solutions for users of accessibility and assistive technology. So I’ve spent the last few years developing and promoting the concepts of fair access to all and user engagement whenever I get the opportunity. This has brought be into contact with enthusiastically dedicated  people and projects. The scale and scope of ÆGIS gives the impression open accessibility is now coming of age. The strap line of ‘Open Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards’ indicates the wide scope of the project which aims to use open source, open development and open standards to ‘enable people with disabilities, the elderly and anyone else who is disadvantaged when using Internet services, Desktop PC or Mobile phones’. It will do this by providing developers with a framework, architecture and toolkits, whilst also creating end user applications. 4 pilot studies will inform the subsequent development phases.

The Pan-European Workshop completed the launch week activities at Research In Motion’s Slough Offices and shared the proceedings with Raising The Floor an initiative by Gregg Vanderheiden and Jim Fruchterman to bring together all parties working on web accessibility, again using open practices. Greg has been involved in accessibility for many years and in his Introduction, Peter Korn, technical lead on ÆGIS sited Greg as his primary mentor. Peter in turn has been very active in open accessibility, especially the GNOME desktop which is used in Linux (e.g Ubuntu) and Sun’s Solaris. Peter along with Will Walker has taken a key role in orchestrating the  resources of their employer Sun to bear on making GNOME a focus of much open accessibility work, including infrastructure, the Orca screen reader, GOK on screen keyboard and collaboration with the Firefox web browser accessibility team.

In addition to hearing more about ÆGIS, the workshop offered the opportunity to catch up with some of the collaborators from the Ace Centre, OATSoft.org, aIDEAS & Mozilla as well as being something of a ‘tweatup’ for those who follow each other on Twitter, including Henni of Opera, Steve Faulkener and Gez Lemon of TPG and Davis Sloan of the University of Dundee. There was woefully little time to chat and I completely missed David Banes of AbilityNet and David McKay of Inference Labs, Cambridge (Dasher is an alternative text input program). I did finally meet Jutta Treviranus, director of ATRC at University of Toronto. Jutta is the boss of long term open accessibility developer David Bolter (e.g. GOK, dojo, ARIA), and we also heard the news that David is taking a years break from ATRC to work on Mozilla core accessibility with Maroc and Surkov.

Due to my failure to understand the scale of the map I arrived after the start having wondered up and down the batch road. The first few talks by M Gonzalez-Sancho (EU Commision ICT for inclusion, information and media Directorate General) and E Bekiarias (CERTH-HIT) provided high level views of the EU’s inclusion policies and AEGIS (£12.6M funding) as well as feedback from the previous days user forum.

Peter Korn then gave a technical overview with demos of existing applications including old friends such as the accessibility APIs, GOK, Orca+eSpeak, Dasher and Accerciser. In addition Peter showed an as yet unreleased simulator of visual impairments such as macular degeneration.

Dr Bekiarias then presented the AEGIS use cases which appear to present a reasonably representative and useful range. I was pleased to see symbol support in OpenOffice.org along with synthetic voices. As Simon Judge pointed out the desktop had little for AAC and switch users but  there is more on the mobile platform.

After an all too brief lunch, Dr C Galinski (InfoTerm) gave a presentation on structured content standards. This was followed by a very effective talk by Greg on accessibility overall and Raising the Floor. He made the point that what we do determines if ICT is a blessing or a curse to many users. He provided a clear analysis of the ways of providing accessibility (adjust interface, provide alternative interface, select alternative or download new interface on demand) and asserted that the accessibility API’s are the only real chance for an affordable and lasting strategies for flexible interface options (and I agree). He also considered reducing cost to users and the part OSS plays, seeing this as enabling more direct paths for the transfer of research and allowing the public coverage of costs other than licences. he also suggested we might like to consider free public access (cf public/private schools) and the need to fund more than research - e.g hardening, awareness, support.

Before the panel discussion Peter announced the Open Accessibility Everywhere Group. The desire to bring together all interested parties including developers, researchers and users and so facilitate exchange of ideas it echos the original motivations that underly Oatsoft.org and later Project:Possibility. While Oatsoft’s funding was only for an initial evaluation phase we can hope that OAEG will succesfully fill this important community role and so help us push the open accessibility envelope. There is an overlap here with Raising the floor that will need to be worked out, though AEGIS adds desktop and mobile accessibility to RtF’s focus on web accessibility.

I was pleased to see a place for the open accessibility projects I have been personally active in. In addition to key projects such as Mozilla, GNOME and NVDA I saw some potential for those I have been closely involved in as a developer; Simon Judge thought Maavis has something to offer in many use cases, and the straight-street.com open symbol set has much to offer. Jambu may also be useful as a starting point for some work. I’m not sure about PowerTalk as it relies on MS technologies but at least that is now included in the EduApps USB stick collection. Greg again mentioned his interest in OATSoft.org as providing the master list of projects, though the announcement of the OAEG seem to indicate it would be providing similar functionality after all.

So all-in-all a useful workshop but perhaps too many presentations with too wide a scope; I would have liked more networking time. ÆGIS is an exciting project and a serious opportunity for the benefits of open accessibility to be realised by users and developers alike. There is a lot to be done and good management will be need to ensure it delivers, but building on open development gives it a very good foundation for success. I’m looking forward to being involved as well as watching what happens.

I’m greatful to Ross Gardler (OSS Watch manager) for being so supportive of open accessibility and providing me opportunities to make it part of OSS Watch’s portfolio of experience. My first project was AccessApps and we spent Tuesday in a highly constructive consultation with the Maavis project, working out ways forward by embracing open development.

That reminds me I have an article on open accessibility to take though OSS Watch’s thorough quality control process.

Open Development embraced by OMII-UK projects

Published by stevelee on June 2, 2009 in Development, Software, Strategy and Policy and Community. 1 Comment

Towards the end of April I found myself spending  2 enjoyable days in the company of OMII-UK members at the OMII-UK collaboration Workshop along with others involved in e-Research in various capacities.  Steve Brewer,  project manager of the Engage project, invited me to provide OSS Watch input at the event which included Open Source and Open Development as a key theme. This provided an opportunity for me to learn more about e-Research and meet those working in it, whilst also passing on some of our experience in open development to those project team members wanting to better embrace the techniques. Dr Mario Antonioletti, principle consultant at EPCC and long time OGSA-DAI project team member subsequently requested that I facilitate a session which became the following:

How to invigorate your project with open development: Using an OSI approved open source licence on your project artefacts and putting them on a public server is one thing but how do you nurture a lively community that ensures your project continues to develop and becomes self sustaining?  Open development is the lifeblood of successful open source projects but how does it work, what tools and process make is successful? How does it mesh with the project life cycle and at what stage should it be introduced?  This breakout will explore open development and how it can be applied to individual projects. Come along and share questions, suggestions and experiences from your own projects.

This was a deliberate ploy to concentrate everyone’s energy on understanding open development as opposed to open source, as I explained in both this session and another lead by Steve Brewer on ‘Accelerating the deployment and uptake of open source tools in e-Research’. Working for OSS Watch has help me clarify my understanding of a fundamental principle of open source projects. This is something that, having been active  in several open source projects, I rather take for granted, but that is often not immediately apparent to newcomers to the scene.  The Apache Software Foundation say it well in their policy statement of  ‘community over code’, and back in 1992 the IETF’s phrase ‘We believe in: rough consensus and running code’ puts community decision making first. Having worked with active open source projects such as Mozilla and GNOME it’s clear to me that nurturing a vibrant and diverse community is the vital ingredient for success and sustainability. In contrast there is often a focus of attention on licence issues by those new to open source, and while this is a key part of the picture, OSS Watch now also emphasise  ‘open development’ in order to restore balance. This also helps projects more clearly see why fundamentals such as encouraging participation through the use of well tested collaboration tools and having a clear governance model are critical for their long term health.

Accordingly I was keen to steer discussion towards the issues surrounding open development and how to achieve it, as well as providing recommendations and clearly indicating OSS Watch’s desire to work with projects, providing support from our collective experience.

During the 2 days I chatted with members of at least 4 mature e-Research projects, each at an intermediate stage of practising open development; OGSA-DAI, DIASER, ALADDIN and Portal Access Grid. I encouraged all to go a stage further towards fully embracing open development, so it is exciting to hear announcements from 2 of them that clearly indicate that they heeded some of our recommendations.

Damian Brasher’s DIASER was already practising many of the principles and has now followed our recommendation to make early decisions and design notes available as project memory as these were not originally discussed on the public discussion lists. This involved considerable work but the outcome is that anyone can now find this information archived on public list and can more easily evaluate the project.

OGSA-DAI started as a closed community project though it is now released under an open source licence. During the workshop Mario stated his desire for the project to practice open development as I described it.  Thus it was a pleasure to see an article by Mike Jackson in the June 09 edition of National e-Science Centre news stating they are commited to achieving it.

OGSA-DAI: from open source product to open source project

The OGSA-DAI project has been funded by EPSRC for an additional year, until April 2010. This funding will enable us to evolve OGSA-DAI from an open source product into an open source project.

An international community of users and developers has formed around OGSA-DAI, our unique open source product for access to and integration of distributed heterogeneous data resources. This includes projects and institutions in a myriad of fields including medical research, environmental science, geo-sciences, the arts and humanities and business.

Moving to an open source project will provide the community with a focal point for the evolution, development, use and support of OGSA-DAI and its related components, providing a means by which
members can develop and release their components alongside the core product. It will also provide an avenue to ensure the sustainability of their components. Over the next few months we will set in place the
governance and infrastructure of the OGSA-DAI open source project. This will be done in conjunction with key community members, and will draw upon the expertise of our OMII-UK partners in Manchester and
Southampton and in the Globus Alliance. We aim to roll out our open source project site in October.

Our move to an open source project contributes to OMII-UK’s vision to promote software sustainability, and will guarantee that the lifetime of the OGSA-DAI product will exist out with any single institution or
funding stream. In addition, we will continue to develop the product and engage with international standardisation activities:

[snip]

The OGSA-DAI project -which involves both EPCC and the National e-Science Centre- is funded by EPSRC through OMII-UK.

I’d like to congratulate both projects for taking these important steps toward open development and wish them every success. I’m sure the OSS Watch team will be most interested to hear how they progress, I know I am.

OSS Watch provide many articles about open source development including a guide to participating in an open source community and a review of one of the best books on the subject - Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel.

Guest Post: FOSS and the European Parliament

Published by Rowan Wilson on June 1, 2009 in Guest, Procurement, Strategy and Policy and Community. 0 Comments

From time to time OSS Watch will be publishing guest blog posts here to highlight interesting opinions from around the FOSS community. This post is by Gerry Gavigan, chairman of the Open Source Consortium.

Elections for the European Parliament are scheduled for 2 June 2009, and this seems like an ideal opportunity to broach the subject of ICT policies and draw the attention of candidates to the issues surrounding choices by government and its administration concerning software and systems. Hopefully, this will at least raise the profile and gain better consideration of the underpinning issues and lead to wider adoption of Free and Open Source Software.

One initiative attempting to do this is the Free Software Pact (FSP) providing candidates with a method to inform the voting public that “they favour the development and use of Free Software, and will protect it from possible threatening EU legislation.”

As Chairman of the Open Source Consortium I was asked to help promote the FSP. Fundamentally I agree with the underlying objectives of the FSP but I am not sure that the approach to implementation is well thought through.

I am convinced that level playing fields coupled with open and transparent processes topped off with effective governance (easier said than done, of course) are all that Free Software needs for new installations and also to trickle through the arteries and capillaries of existing ICT deployments, eventually eliminating the externalities of proprietary software (largely summarisable as the deadweight costs arising from distortions in the market). I should add that this opinion is vendor neutral. I don’t care who it is or how Free Software is supplied.

If we are to achieve this nirvana we need to approach those we are seeking to influence in terms that are meaningful to them. This is not always easy but that is not an excuse not to try. And it may require several goes. Additionally if one is seeking to influence politicians or administrations is is easier to go with the grain of things than start again somewhere else.

With that in mind and prompted by the FSP, it seems right to put my drafting where my opinions were. Accordingly the OSC has created a draft form letter that hope as many people as possible will send it to the candidates in their constituency.

Dear…

Support Implementation of draft European Interoperability Framework V2 “EIF V2″

As you are a candidate in the forthcoming elections for the European Parliament I am writing to seek your support for a simple measure that will help citizens, businesses and European society.

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has become a critical part of European infrastructure; a modern economy cannot function without it.

Optimal choices in ICT need a European policy on interoperability in ICT.

Interoperability means it does not matter how you mix and match the constituent parts of ICT, they will just work with each other without problems or issues. Such choice also means that users of your ICT systems (e.g., users of European or national government on-line services) do not have to make ICT choices based on your decisions, e.g., having to use a specific web browser (that itself may require a specific operating system).

Many European and national ICT systems have been implemented using software which does not enable easy interoperability, and instead creates an effect where it becomes easier, and some cases necessary, to choose more of the same supplier’s products, and harder to choose competing products.

Moreover, once governments or local administrations have decided to use software that does not enable easy interoperability, that choice imposes a requirement for the citizen or customer to choose the same software.

This network effect prevents choice, competition and limits opportunities to promote innovation outside vendor control, in the whole European arena for ICT.

To have agreed as policy the (draft) EIF V2 ( http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7728) will halt and eventually reverse this situation.

This draft has been criticised by vendors currently benefiting from the current uneven playing field, but its adoption would not prevent any vendor, current or future, from supplying ICT to European or national governments.

The EIF is not considered to by all to be perfect, but getting it firmly “inside the tent” would enable it to be improved. I urge you to adopt or adapt this letter and write.

You can find your existing MEPs and candidates here.

Gerry Gavigan

Conference: Open Source in the Public Sector

Published by Rowan Wilson on March 27, 2009 in Business, Strategy and Policy and Community. 1 Comment

“The country is in an economic crisis…”

That’s how the description of Kable’s upcoming conference on Open Source in the Public Sector begins, and it’s becoming a regular theme in marketing in every sector. This morning brings news that Microsoft is planning to air a series of TV ads that attacks Apple’s pricing as inappropriate in these cash-starved times. In the light of this, Steve Ballmer’s assertion last week that Apple customers are essentially paying upwards of $500 else for a logo and nothing else looks like a teaser for the ad campaign. Ballmer’s sound-bite was taken up by noted open source blogger Glyn Moody who mischievously suggested that this was Ballmer’s backhanded way of acknowledging Windows had lost the fight against Linux to be the pre-eminent OS on the low-priced, tiny and increasingly popular sub-laptops known as netbooks. After all, writes Moody:

“who’s going to pay extra money just to get the Windows logo on a netbook, when they can get the same features for less with free software…?”

Clearly the IT sector is in the mood to be wooed with promises of low prices. In the public sector too, as this blog has mentioned in the past the February 2009 Cabinet Office action plan Open Source, Open Standards and Reuse strongly promoted the consideration of free and open source software:

“Open Source has been one of the most significant cultural developments in IT and beyond over the last two decades: it has shown that individuals, working together over the Internet, can create products that rival and sometimes beat those of giant corporations; it has shown how giant corporations themselves, and Governments, can become more innovative, more agile and more cost-effective by building on the fruits of community work…”

and adding the following imperative added to public policy on IT procurement:

“Where there is no significant overall cost difference between open and non-open source products, open source will be selected on the basis of its additional inherent flexibility.”

This document should perhaps be read in the light of the Chancellor Alistair Darling’s demand that public sector IT should find effiency savings of £5bn before 2011…

Clearly this is an appropriate time for an event such as Kable’s (disclosure: OSS Watch supports this event and will be speaking at it) which invites delegates from the public and not-for-profit sectors to come and hear about the pros and cons of free and open source adoption and to discuss the issues with others in the same position. As well as attendees and speakers from OSS Watch, there will be representatives from across the public sector and from the Open Source Schools project, the Open Source Consortium, the British Computer Society’s Open Source Specialist Group and noted think-tank the Centre for Policy Studies. It looks to be an interesting event. Hope to see you there…

UK Government to level the playing field?

Published by Ross Gardler on February 25, 2009 in Discussion, Strategy and Policy and Standards. 5 Comments

In May 2008 OSS Watch published a workshop report with the title “Levelling the playing field: developing a mixed economy for software procurement”. This report focussed on procurement in the Higher and Further Education sectors and recomended that we work to:

  • ensure all solutions use open standards and provide protection against vendor lock-in
  • facilitate better communication with senior managers across HE/FE as to the potential benefits and pitfalls of making use of open source solutions
  • encourage educational ICT bodies with an overview of the sector such as UCISA and BECTA to assist institutions with open source related training and knowledge
  • work to improve the ITT and PPQ processes within institutions

OSS Watch has been funded by the JISC since 2003, part of our remit has been to facilitate the appropriate adoption of open source in the sector, yet the recomendations made in our workshop were largely the same as they were in 2003. Did this mean that OSS Watch was having no effect?

I’m pleased to say that OSS Watch have had some influence on the adoption of open source in the  education sector. For example, we worked with our own funders on an open source policy which was adopted in 2004. Similarly, we worked with BECTA during the creation of the Open Source Schools project (as well as helping BECTA understand what the goals of this project were we continue to provide advice, guidance and materials to the company running the site).

However, when it comes to influencing individual procurement decisions we have struggled to have any significant impact. Put bluntly, there is very little our small team can do when faced with procurement policies and staff that are predisposed towards the incumbent suppliers products.

I was therefore encouraged when the Cabinet Office published “Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan“. This document is intended to put open source software onto an equal footing with proprietary forms for procurement.

As with the 2004 government policy on open source we are assured that “Procurement decisions will be made on the basis on [sic] the best value for money solution to the business requirement, taking account of total lifetime cost of ownership of the solution, including exit and transition costs, after ensuring that solutions fulfil minimum and essential capability, security, scalability, transferability, support and manageability requirements” and “The Government will use open standards in its procurement specifications and require solutions to comply with open standards. The Government will support the development of open standards and specifications.”

However, this new document goes a small, but important, step further.

It states “Where there is no significant overall cost difference between open and non-open source products, open source will be selected on the basis of its additional inherent flexibility.” Many commentators have, so far, missed the importance of this statement. The key is in the acknowldgement of “additional inherent flexibility”. This is over and above the flexibility provided by the adoption of open standards.

This “additional inherent flexibility” is a result of having access to the source code. Closed source software can adopt open standards, but they still provide a form of lock-in since there is only one source of customisation and maintenance for that product. When the source is freely available one is able to shop around various support providers in addition to selecting from various interoperating products.

The introduction of competition through open standards is clearly a step in the right direction. However, competition between software providers is also desirable. This is a topic I cover when presenting at procurement related events, and is something OSS Watch believe is very important given that requirements for software usually change as an organisation matures. These changes may not be aligned with the business model of the current support provider.

I’m also encouraged to see that the document identifies a number of actions including “develop clear and open guidance for ensuring that open source and proprietary products are considered equally” (action 1). This is a very complex issue and is something OSS Watch have been trying to do in the education sector for some time.

The problem is that open source and closed source solutions cannot be compared using the same techniques. Whilst the software products themselves can be compared on a feature by feature basis, the softer aspects, such as quality of support, security, flexibility and sustainability of the solution cannot be easily compared like for like. Consequently, it is necessary to change the procurement process itself before any real impact will be seen. Simon Phipps of Sun Microsystems suggests one potential model for a level procurement playing field through adoption led approaches, and warns about how the existing process can be gamed.

Further to the need to change the procurement process we must also ensure our workforce has the necessary skills to evaluate and engage with open source software. Without this skillset policies and action plans will fall on deaf ears, who is going to implement them? I discuss this in my November post “We have an open source future - or do we?“

Despite these concerns, I welcome this document from the Cabinet Office and encourage those with an understanding of open source and, in particular, how it should be evaluated to actively review and comment on the document using the CIO defined tag of #ukgovOSS so that it gets picked up and syndicated on a special public FOSS Aggregation page.