Open Source Government

Council of the EU Excludes Constituents from Services

I am assuming that no members of the Council of the European Union are regular visitors to OSG, which I must admit is a little bit disappointing.

It certainly appears that Council of the European Union did not read Bruce Perens’ paper, recently covered here, on "Principles for e-Government and Government-Funded Research Software Development".

In a move that can be only described as counter-intuitive, the Council of the EC has decided to provide their streaming video services exclusively in the proprietary and exclusionary Windows Media format rather than embracing an open standard format that can be consumed by all constituents.

In the current situation, citizens must play ball with a specific vendor to access the public records. In contrast, Open codecs for the video streaming make these records available to the entire computer-using population, not just a subset. At the same time open standards keep the council independent from any specific vendor, giving them freedom of choice in both access and maintenance. Likewise, for the web pages the issue is not a question of web browsers but again a matter of supporting open standards.

Please, sign the petition and ensure your voice is heard.

Add comment January 2nd, 2007

Principles for e-Government and Government-Funded Research Software Development.

Bruce Perens has posted a paper on Technocrat.net which outlines some of the considerations to be addressed by technical policy makers in the public sector.

The choice of technology in e-government projects and government-funded research can result in unfair discrimination and unintended harm. This set of guidelines will help the technologist avoid that harm.

Goals

Government should be fair to all citizens, while giving preference to none. It’s important for government and society to protect people who are at a disadvantage - for example those with physical handicaps - and to make sure that they can participate in society and interact with their government to the same extent as the more normally able. And government should give the people the most possible benefit for their tax dollars, and should use those dollars efficiently.

Add comment December 27th, 2006