Robert Pogson

Joinup has quotations from three women involved in the movement to open government by use of IT and FLOSS. They spoke at the Semantic Interoperability Conference 2012. The majority hold that FLOSS is a good match for open government and that similar opposition is faced by open government and FLOSS:

• Jeanne Holm, Evangelist for Data.Gov, the open government initiative of the US government. “Open source makes it easier for organisations, even those without much funds, to start working on sets of government data. This type of software gathers the intelligence of the whole community.”
• “Julia Glidden, e-government expert and managing director of the UK-based 21c Consultancy: IT departments can come up a million excuses for not using open source, she said.”
• “Katleen Janssen, a legal researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT at the Catholic University of Leuven is less sure of the link between open data and open source. “If open data becomes part of the philosophy of the public administrations, they will also move to open source. If open data is something they do because everybody else is, or because they are forced to, the effect will be limited.”"

That’s not unlike the relationship of FLOSS with educational institutions. FLOSS is mostly off the radar but when the product comes on-line it is more familiar/less threatening and the advantages emerge. People had to change in order to adapt to that other OS and M$’s machinations. Now that they seem “normal”, changing to GNU/Linux and FLOSS applications takes a little effort. It all works out in the end.

'Governments that embrace open data will also switch to open source' | Joinup.