The UK has been described as “a world leader in ineffective IT schemes for government“. There have been a number of high cost IT initiatives which have run late, under-performed or failed over the last 20 years including: the Child Support Agency’s IT system, the IT system that would have underpinned the National ID Card scheme, the Defence Information Infrastructure Programme, the implementation of the Single Payments Scheme by the Rural Payments Agency, and the National Offender Management System (C-Nomis).

The main problem, the report says, is that the Government does not have the internal skills to specify and procure IT systems. As a result they tend to rely on large external contractors to manage the process of developing IT systems (and to subcontract to smaller businesses where necessary) . Naturally this involves handing over very large amounts of both cash and power to the ‘head’ contractors, and it is this complete externalisation of the ‘IT customer’ function that the report points to as the key failing in previous large government IT procurements. The answer, therefore, is to get better IT management skills within departments and take on the management of the smaller subcontractors themselves.

This is not the only failing identified. It seems that Government also tends to ‘gold-plate’ (over-specify) security requirements even on systems that do not require it. The report also criticises the tendency to see IT projects as a distinct kind of problem rather than an exercise in change management like any other. Nevertheless, it is the ‘externalisation’ problem which looms largest in the report’s somewhat gloomy findings, and it is in this context that the issue of open source arises.

Early on the report identifies the creation of ‘a level playing field for open source software’ as one of the approaches to solving the problem of Government IT that had already been suggested. In the recommendations, we find that open source is mentioned in the context of providing an open data platform for Government-held data which could be developed upon by third parties to provide analysis and manipulation applications. While both of these suggestions are sound in themselves, I think it is in the core recommendation that we can see the best opportunity to realise value for the UK taxpayer from open source software and development.

While there are very large scale corporations offering open source solutions, the majority of bidders for Government IT contracts offer closed source solutions, often with the bidder themselves retaining ownership of the IPR in the resultant code and licensing it under very restrictive terms. If the current reforms succeed in getting departments to break down IT procurements into smaller interoperating sections and invite bids for these from smaller, more agile developers, the opportunity for existing successful open source projects to be the bases for Government IT solutions expands. Assuming that the newly-acquired IT experts within departments are able to meaningfully engage with the communities around these projects – both through their hired developers and as users themselves – then huge amounts of value in terms of code, user requirements and expertise which are currently locked into closed, non-functioning projects will be available for the good of the community at large. The projects themselves will learn how to interact with Government clients, and software components of general application will find their way back into the public space to benefit other large-scale users.

All of these benefits, though, depend both on an openness to the use of open source software but also on expertise in managing the relationship with that software’s community. So while I welcome heartily the proposal that Government acquire the IT skills to take a hands-on role in managing their IT procurements, I hope that those IT skills will include expertise in exploiting the unique benefits of joining an open source community.

This two day event focused on getting people up to speed on building widgets. Our approach was to give some very light touch training and then get our hands dirty on code. Overall the two days were extremely successful.

in the run up to the event I had committed a few new widget templates to Wookie in order to make it easy for people to get started. This turned out to be a great tactic. Some attendees used these templates as a base for their work, looking to enhance them, one attendee even submitted a patch to fix an error in my work (which I have now committed to the project, thanks Sam Rowley). Another attendee reported that one of the tutorials was misleading (another issue I have now addressed, thanks Simon Booth).

A team from the Manchester Metropolitan University enhanced a widget they had already created to tell students which labs had available PCs in them. Now it’s a fully geo-locating widget that sorts the results by proximity to the users position (interestingly using the tutorial Simon helped us improve). Another team from Strathclyde enhanced the Moodle Plugin for Wookie; now widgets are able to get a little more context from Moodle and thus provide more targeted information to the user. We hope to see patches and contributions from both these teams.

Many other participants who had never build widgets before reported that they’d learned a great deal. There were plenty of “almost working” enhancements to our templates as well as completely new widgets. Again, I look forward to applying their patches.

Why not come and join us on the Wookie project and find out what it’s all about.

You can read more about the two days on Sheila’s blog.

Government must be better connected to the people it serves and partners who can work with it – especially small businesses, voluntary and community organisations. Government ICT must play a fundamental role in making life easier and I want to ensure that it does.

One of our first goals is to organise Government data and systems using an agreed set of standards that make our ICT more open, cheaper and better connected.

If you’re a business or community organisation, helping us choose the right standards will make it easier for you to do business with Government.  It will also help us open up data, better informing your decisions, and hopefully prompting innovation.

There’s a lot of detail in the very long list of obtuse standard numbers, but fortunately a mechanism is provided to skip sections you aren’t interested in. Otherwise you can vote on each standard on a scale between mandatory and don’t use. Refreshingly for a survey, there are spaces for you to add your own thoughts (though you can’t add each on a new line as requested).

I spotted couple of typos and more seriously, the Microsoft originated ISO/IEC 29500 Office Open XML is incorrectly called ‘Open Office XML. This is bound to lead to confusion as the alternatively listed ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) standard was originally implemented in OpenOffice (and is now implemented by LibreOffice).

Open standards play well with open source software developement and we encourage you to take the survey. However do bear in mind the government’s past record in implementing open technology policies. You might also want to look at Glyn Moody’s related post about the Government’s definition of open standards provided in the procurement policy note.

One example that currently stands out is Diaspora*, a project idea to create a distributed system where each person manages their own data rather than trusting it to a central hub run by a business. In a few days the four NYU students behind the project have gained a lot of interest and an awful lot of micro funding pledges. As noted above, it is not surprising that they propose to use open standards, open source and open development in their descriptions. But could there be a better form of ‘open’ to consider here?

As Social Hacking points out, if you are going to build another open Facebook you might as well make sure it is an improvement. While the author makes several points for how to make sure you surpass the existing Facebook, one really stuck out when I read it.

3. Learn from Academic Researchers

Many people in the academic community are producing research that addresses how people interact both offline and online, as well as how people understand concepts of privacy and social networking. As websites continue to reshape the fabric of our society and Facebook in particular affects notions of privacy, you simply can’t afford to ignore these studies.

My interest was piqued not only because we at OSS Watch are based in academia and support research projects. Rather, I was interested as it hints at, but does not make explicit, a powerful opportunity from being ‘open’. Taking it at face value it’s possible to interpret the comment as a suggestion to read papers and be influenced by the ideas they contain. I was struck by a more powerful way to embrace the ideas, namely through open innovation in software, or open development of open source software.

Open Innovation allows companies and developers to directly engage with academics in a collaborative relationship likely to be much more fruitful than just consuming papers. This can lead to a win-win where the project gains from the theory, leading to more profitability, and the academic gets a working implementation of their work, not to mention exposure and validation. Hopefully the Diaspora* project will take steps to actively engage some of the listed academics in their project, and so reap the rewards.

There are some hurdles to overcome on the road to open innovation. Not least are issues of trust and cultural differences, along with the need to find the right people. However there is growing understanding of how to manage these issues, building on the wealth of experience learnt in those open source projects that have successfully crossed boundaries. JISC are also encouraging pilot studies of open innovation through the recent JISC Grant Funding 1/10: Access to Resources and Open Innovation.

On June 24/25/26 in Oxford there is an excellent opportunity to directly explore open innovation with the people who are actively engaged in it. The TransferSummit, provides a forum for business executives and members of the academic and research community to discuss requirements, challenges, and opportunities in the use, development, licensing, and future of Open Source technology. I hope to see you there.

Scott Wilson, the Wookie guru from Bolton University, where it all started, started the day off with a presentation (pdf) of what widgets and Wookie are all about. Widgets are basically small mini applications that are designed to work in a small view area. Many platforms have created their own format for it, but the W3C is working on a set of specifications for it with a consortium of partners from both traditional computing and mobile platforms, which will lead to a true cross-platform standard which will hopefully lead to widespread adoption. A minimal W3C widget consists of nothing more than a config file and an HTML file, zipped up as an archive with file extension .wgt. The config file contains basic configuration such as the name, description and preferred dimensions of the widgets. The widget can furthermore include as much HTML, CSS, images and JavaScript files as one would like.

Apache Wookie (Incubating) is an application that provides a W3C-compliant widget server. You can use Wookie to deploy widgets and you can serve W3C widgets from the Wookie server in third party applications. Plugins have already been written for Moodle, LAMS, Sakai and Google Wave. Wookie also has a REST API that can be used to get, or create widgets.

After Scott’s intro it was time to get dirty. Ross handed out CDs containing the latest sourcecode of Wookie (which can be downloaded by anybody from Subversion) and prerequisites like a JDK and Apache Ant. His presentation (pdf) was about ‘how to build your first widget’. I was surprised to see that there were 10 people with Mac-books in the room, amongst 4 Windows machines and one Linux netbook. Apple surely knows how to impress the developer these days! After some initial troubles with environment settings etc. most people got up-and-running fairly quickly and were ready to build their first widget. Wookie provides handy Ant tasks for building and deploying widgets, which means that generating a hello-world skeleton widget is as easy as typing ant seed-widget and answering some questions about the name, description and dimensions of your widget. After you have started up the Wookie server using ant run you can deploy the widget using ant deploy-widget. That was it, quite easily. I must say, having moved away from Ant and using Maven2 for the last few years, it’s nice to be remembered of the powerful features Ant has to offer. Especially since Wookie uses Ant in combination with Apache Ivy, the dependency management alternative for Maven2. (To be precise, you can also use Ivy with Maven2 repositories). Ross also demonstrated how you can make use of OpenStreetMap JavaScript APIs to embed cool navigational features in your widget quite easily. You can check out his presentation (pdf) or directly check out the source code of the tutorial including the example JavaScript.

In his second presentation (pdf) Scott focussed on some design principles behind the widget specification and gave a walk-through of how you can design a more advanced widget by making use of features of the W3C widget object API and integrate with the Google Wave Gadgets API. No Wave server is needed to get this working, as Wookie can handle everything for you. Scott demonstrated a Task widget with collaboration features, that can be used by different users concurrently using State and Participants.

After the break it was high time for everybody to create their own widget and some interesting ideas had come up. One of us decided it would be much cooler to hack directly in the server code instead of building widgets and he submitted a patch to Wookie to allow hot deployment of a widget to ease the development/deployment cycle. That’s very cool, thanks Matthew!

The rest of us built some widgets for a wide variety of purposes. One of the nice things about the widgets was that we could easily merge them all together on one Wookie instance and show all widgets there. These were some of the widgets that resulted from this 1.5 hour hack-fest:

• Video player embedded in a widget with fallback to other formats depending on the user agent
• Display a list of links using output from one of the Yahoo pipes
• Display the last.fm playlist of a user and show what that user is currently listening to
• Show a canvas drawing where multiple people can collaborate by working on the same drawing using HTML5
• Cool kids’ game where the user can name his pet dinosaur
• Currency converter that (eventually) would use an external currency conversion provider

It was fun to see how easily you can create functional widgets. If you make use of external JavaScript APIs or data feeds it is also quite simple to create a useful (or not so useful…) widget. This was a nice conclusion of the day and seeing all the widgets we had created we thought we had deserved our beer and headed off to the pub. Thanks to Scott and Ross for making this a successful Wookie training day!

Wookie provides an implementation of the W3C widget standard and allows you to write, deploy and manage W3C compliant widgets easily. The project is also working on implementing extra modules, such as a Google Wave Gadgets API. To increase cross-platform interoperability, several plugins have been written to integrate with other systems, such as Moodle and Wordpress.

This event is free of charge and invitation only. However, we have three open places left for interested developers. General development skills are required, but you don’t need to have specific experience in building widgets. If you are interested we welcome you to contact us on info@oss-watch.ac.uk and let us know why you should to be there. If you would like to know more, details about this all day event can be found on the event page.

One of the reasons we hold this event is in preparation for the dev8D developer days. During that event we will be doing more widget development in a Wookie hackathon and we want to gather some more skilled widget developers for that hackathon. Therefore we expect people who come to the Wookie training day to also attend the dev8D days. However, don’t hesitate to contact us for the Wookie training day if you can’t make it to dev8D.

In January Scott Wilson attended an OSS Watch workshop on software sustainability at which I and my colleague Rowan Wilson presented a number of models for managing open source software in a sustainable way. After my presentation Scott approached me to ask what was involved with entering the Apache Incubator.

I’m pleased to announce that the Wookie proposal has now been accepted into the incubator. There is still some work to do before the code actually appears there, but it won’t be long

This is great news for all involved. OSS Watch hope that Wookie will go on to provide our first significant use case demonstrating that software developed in the UK academic sector can, and should, become useful beyond our sector. I congratulate the Wookie team on clearly separating the domain specific features of their work from the generic code that will be useful beyond their core team. It is this, and the teams awareness that restricting their code to a niche market would restrict the pool of contributors, that has enabled OSS Watch to assist Wookie as it worked towards entry into the Apache Incubator.

I truly believe that the University of Bolton, and any other project or institution that adopts the Wookie code, will benefit significantly from this move. Already we are seeing interest from many third parties, indeed, it is a long time since a proposal passed with such a large number of positive votes.

[DISCLAIMER: I am a Member of The Apache Software Foundation, but this has no bearing on the choice of the ASF as a home for Wookie. The justification for the ASF is that it has a track record of producing reference implementations for open standards]

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.

“Yes, well, three of the eight patents in this dispute read on the Linux kernel as implemented by TomTom. The other five relate to car navigation proprietary software used by TomTom.”                   

Words like these bring back terrible memories of Microsoft’s – and particularly Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s –  past statements in this area. Back in 2004  Ballmer told the Asian Government Leaders Forum in Singapore that Linux infringed on “over 228″ software patents and that

“somebody will come and look for money owing to the rights for that intellectual property…”              

Journalists seeking clarification of Ballmer’s comments at the time from Microsoft’s PR department were told that Ballmer was referring to a 2004 study by Dan Ravicher  that identified 283 potential software patent infringements within Linux. Ravicher responded that Ballmer was misreporting the essence of the report, which was that any operating system would necessarily infringe the 283 patents in question (Ravicher did not list them) and that therefore Linux was in no greater danger of infringement than any other operating system. The report was commissioned and published by a firm called Open Source Risk Management, who coincidentally were just about to start selling insurance for users of Linux who feared being hit with unexpected patent fees. Ravicher is now Legal Director of the Software Freedom Law Center, a law firm that specialises in helping authors of FOSS.

Of course this was not the only piece of horse-spooking that Microsoft has engaged in over the years. In May 2007 senior Microsoft lawyers Brad Smith and Horacio Gutierrez (sound familiar?) told Fortune Magazine that Linux infringes on 235 Microsoft-owned software patents and that:

“This is not a case of some accidental, unknowing infringement… There is an overwhelming number of patents being infringed.”       

Shortly after this Microsoft announced a deal with Novell that would protect customers using Novell’s SUSE Linux distribution from patent action by Microsoft – the obvious implication being that customers of all other Linux distributions must therefore be at risk (OSS Watch covered this issue and the Free Software Foundation’s reaction in our description of the GNU GPL v3 here).

So is the current climate of fear really warranted? Probably not. For a start, Gutierrez himself is at pains to say that this is not the beginning of the earth-shattering IP showdown that Linux users have been fearing for years:

I should say, Microsoft respects and appreciates the important role that open-source software plays in our industry, and we respect and appreciate the passion and the great contribution that open-source developers make in our industry. That appreciation and respect is not inconsistent with our respect for intellectual-property rights. Partnership with all technology companies, including those that adopt a mixed-source model, must be built on mutual respect for IP rights — rights that we all rely on for driving innovation and opportunity.Now, this case is against TomTom, and it involves infringement of Microsoft patents by TomTom devices. Each case is different, and this one is specifically about the use of software by TomTom in its devices.        

(from here.) In the past it has clearly been a strategic aim of Microsoft’s to cast doubt on the legality of Linux. The Microsoft quotes mentioned above were without doubt intended to make potential Linux users think twice about where they should spend their money. With the Tomtom case – in contrast – Microsoft seems to be at pains to go further than it needs to in calming Linux users about the potential for broad litigation against their chosen operating system. Just note the contrast between the Gutierrez of 2007’s Fortune article and the Gutierrez of 2009’s Tomtom-related interview. There seems to be a genuine movement towards playing down the implied threats of the past.

 Why has this happened? It’s almost impossible for an outsider to say.It is clear that Microsoft’s former strategy of implying that Linux was about to disappear under storm of patent infringement suits did not significantly affect Linux uptake. The Linux community adapted through initiatives like the Open Invention Network - a patent-holding organisation supported by Sony, Novell, Red Hat, IBM, NEC and Philips that licenses its IP at no cost to anyone who agrees not to assert their own patent rights against Linux. Of course, if you choose to assert your rights against Linux, the OIN will closely examine your products to make sure that none of their patents are embodied in them. In practice it’s this kind of ’sue-me-and-i’ll-sue-you’ standoffs that prevent all-out patent war in the IT sector, and the number of patent-holding corporations with a stake in Linux now makes it potentially as risky to sue as any other single large technology player – maybe riskier given the added liability of blogosphere backlash and community hatred for any moves against FOSS. 

When OSS Watch spoke to OIN’s then-CEO Jerry Rosenthal in 2007 he believed that they would probably never have to actually sue a big player like Microsoft. So while the Microsoft-Tomtom case probably does not herald the the final Microsoft campaign against FOSS, it will be interesting to see whether OIN sees it as sufficient reason to look into enforcing their own patents against Microsoft. Tomtom must be hoping that they do.