Under the Hood: Open Source @ gov.za

As he wrapped up, Aslam Raffee reflected: “We’ve done very well in terms of setting policy, but very poorly at implementation. We’ve got to fix that.” Aslam is one of three people leading to roll out of South Africa’s government-wide commitment to open source. And he’s willing to admit: making it work ain’t easy.

At Open Everything Cape Town, Aslam spent an hour talking with Matt Buckland and Steve Song about how the open source policy roll out is going. The policy basically states that all systems used to run the Government of South Africa must be based on open standards and should use open source software wherever possible. As you can hear the podcast below, he was at once honest about the challenges of making this idea real and optimistic about the future …

Aslam Raffee – mouseover for audio

On the upside, the Government of South Africa seems to be ‘making the market’ by insisting that all departments have open document format (ODF) capability by the end of the year. Microsoft — which had previously given a ‘no way’ — is now on a fast track to integrating to ODF into Word. It seems there are alot of Word users in South Africa who still want to be able to do business with government. Also, there has been good traction on things like open standards and avoiding lock-in with big tenders in areas like government document management. The result is that these systems are most likely to be open source.

On the downside, there is simply a huge amount of ignorance and entropy. Asked if he could give an example of where they’re struggling to get people to ‘be open’, Aslam cited the Independent Election Comission’s brand new web site. When you go to the site in Firefox (I just did), you get this message:

Welcome to the IEC web site! Our server detected that you are using a Browser or Operating System (e.g. Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, etc) which is currently incompatible with our site.This web site is designed for Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 4 and above on Microsoft Windows. The IEC is currently in the process of enhancing the web site so that it will also cater for other browsers. We apologize for the inconvenience caused. Please click on the image below to download the latest version of Internet Explorer.

Even more notably, the ‘currently in the process of enhancing’ language didn’t even exist until a bunch of people blogged about this on Friday. It’s tough to be proud of your government’s commitment to open standards — and equal access to all citizens — with stuff like this.

The other big barrier to implementation is skills.The number of skilled open source developers and support people needed to roll out the government’s plan just don’t exist. Fixing this is partly a waiting game, as it depends on what the education system does … and what’s taught in classrooms is exempt from the open source policy as it isn’t about ‘government administration systems’.

Thanks to Aslam, Matt, Steve and everyone at Open Everything for making this conversation real. I learned a great deal.

The podcast above just includes Aslam’s main talk and the interview by Steve and Matt. You can hear a longer version including another 20 mins of audience questions here (bad audio in some parts).

Cape Town: Rebooting the Open Everything Intro

The vibe and ideas at Friday’s Open Everything Cape Town were super sparky. A nice mix of well known open source projects (South African gov’t open source policy) and novel new ideas (Free Culture House). A good balance of techie and non-techie, with a bias of creative media and open education types. And amazing food, service and atmosphere from Bird’s Cafe. Fun and learning all around.

One of the weaknesses of the Toronto event was the set up. People said they wanted a bit more of ‘what’s open really mean?’ and ‘why is it interesting?’ to set the stage. Philipp and I took at this by introing the Cape Town event with this slide show …

It’s not a bad way to spend 20 mins if you want to get the basic idea of what these events focus on. However, it still doesn’t have the zing it needs. Anriette suggested ‘dig more into the values side of things’. I agree. Also, I just think it needs to be shorter. And, I need to talk slower. Comments very much welcomed.

Of course, the real juice of the event wasn’t Philipp and I — it was all the speedgeekers and the open source in government talk by Aslam Rafee. I’ll be posting on this stuff over the coming days.

PS. Tino Kreutzer has posted some great photos to Flickr, including the one of the Freedom Toaster speedgeek that I included above.

How We Work Remix

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that one of my Shuttleworth open philanthropy experiments was the ‘How We Work‘ club. This is basically a quarterly pizza lunch where the whole organization reflects on an important aspect of how we function as a foundation (e.g. making sure everything is under an open license). The conversations focus on what’s working, what’s not and how things could be better. I then write up a blog posting and an article so that the rest of the world can learn from the discussion.

This week’s pie noshing chat focused on a highly recursive topic: how is the How We Work club working? Somewhat surprisingly to me, the answer was a unanimous ‘it’s working well’ … or, at least, ‘it’s quite useful’.

The first thing that people seem to appreciate is checking our rhetoric against reality. Our discussions on open licensing are a case in point. We’d been saying ‘we’re doing a better job on open licensing’ for while. Sitting down to talk about it underlined the fact that we actually hadn’t finished or published our new Open Resources Policy. And, putting a deadline on writing up an article forced us to actually get the policy done (or, at least, for me to harangue Karen and Andrew constantly ). The result was that we actually delivered what we said we’d been doing: offering a clear open licensing policy that the world could see and our partners could review.

Talking through the open licensing policy also surfaced the fact that we didn’t have consensus on which licenses to promote (share-alike) and who should own intellectual property (external partners or the foundation). An hour of forceful conversation went a long way to showing where the differences were, and helping us construct some common ground. As a result, we ended up with clearer language on license flexibility (share alike is the default, but arguments can be made for slightly more or less open licenses). Also, we created room for different options around IP stewardship (the draft policy had the foundation owning everything). These were important changes that both improved the policy and made sure we had a document that was more widely supported by the team.

The other thing that people appreciate is the opportunity to think through ‘how we work now’ against the backdrop of mistakes we’ve made in the past. Strategy at the Shuttleworth Foundation definitely has a heavy dose of emergence. Which is a nice way to say: we’re willing to make mistakes and then hack things to make them better response. The licensing policy emerged at least in part from problems with our laissez faire ‘just use an open license’ approach. Similarly, the fellowship program grew from frustration with having to invent a ‘project’ to fund for every smart person we wanted to work with. Looking back at the things that shaped current practices has helped us all get on the page about ‘why we are who we are’. Hopefully, it will also result in useful lessons for other small foundations.

Of course, there are some things that are broken about the How We Work process. For example, all of the writing sits with one person (me). Different people have different expertise and passions. It’s likely we’d get better material if the person who cares most about a topic were to write it up. Also, there is a fair bit of brokenness in our follow up and promotion process. We did nothing to get the Open Resources Policy article out there other than putting it up on our site. We need to flog stuff like this more widely.

Despite the fact that I’m heading off into the open philanthropy sunset, the How We Work club will continue, albeit under a new name: Notes From a Small Foundation. There is a general feeling that this is more about ‘what we’re learning’ than simply ‘how we work’. The new name reflects that. Karien will be leading the charge on this new version, with different people facilitating and writing up a session every couple of months. Upcoming topics include ‘IRC, wikis and internal communications’ (Steve S) and ‘project exit strategies’ (Helen). It’ll be fun (and a bit sad) to watch this next chapter unfold from afar.

Moving to Mozilla

It’s official: I will be joining the Mozilla Foundation in late September to take on the role of executive director.

I am totally psyched about this. Mozilla is a new kind of foundation, one with with participation, transparency and innovation at its very roots. It’s not just about giving out grants or making bold statements (although these are useful things to do), but also about getting large numbers of people involved in making things. In particular, things that make the Internet more open. For someone obsessed with reinventing how foundations work, there could be no more exciting job than this.

Of course, I am also a wee bit sad. Moving to Mozilla means leaving my Shuttleworth Foundation and telecentre.org work behind. The people at these two organizations have inspired and challenged me in the most wonderful ways possible. More importantly, they’ve proven to me that little changes to the way we work – like blogging about stuff that normally gets stuck in internal reports – can really help to open up the work of grant making and world changing. My hope is to stay connected to all of these people as an informal advisor and supporter.

Between now and September 22 (my official start date), I will have my head down finishing up my work on the Shuttleworth open philanthropy file. I’ll also be running Open Everything events in South Africa, Canada and Singapore. My mind is already spinning with thoughts of Mozilla — I’ve been talking to people in the Mozilla community about the foundation for many months now. Even so, I really need to take this time to make sure these things all wrap up properly. Once they’re done, I’ll dive head first into Mozilla work, including the continuing conversation about the future of the foundation. I can’t wait.

Open Everything Cape Town this Friday!

I met with The Amazing Philipp Schmidt over the weekend to prep for Open Everything Cape Town. The event is happening this Friday at Bird’s Boutique Cafe. It’s an amazing venue. High ceilings and tons of light. And scrumptious homemade everything.

We spent about an hour going over the agenda. Philipp and Helen (also co-organizing) have done amazing job getting people to present at the event. The speedgeek list looks like this:

Couchsurfing by Mandy Messina

27 Dinners by Dave Duarte
UWC’s Rip. Mix. Learn. by someone from UWC
Mail and Guardian Thought Leader by Matthew Buckland
Siyavula / FHSST by Sarah Blyth
QuirkE Marketing by Rob Stokes
Dabba / Village Telco by Steve Song
Ultimate Holiday Planner by Terence Lapidus
Missing Link by Rich Mulholland
Creative R&D by Steve Kromberg

Also, we’re likely to have an insider view on how the South African Government’s open source adoption project happened … and how it’s rolling out. I promise to podcast if it happens.

If you’re in Cape Town and interested, make sure to sign up on the wiki ASAP. It feels like there is alot of buzz around this event. And space is limited.