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eGovernance and Free Software: How They are Changing Developing Countries - my notes - 29 mars 2006

The United Nations University (UNU) in New York hosted a panel on eGovernance and Free Software: How They are Changing Developing Countries and here are my quick notes.

First, the definitions:

More resources: the MIT hosts the Free / Open Source Research Community which is a good place for papers on Open Source and Free Softwares.

All the presentation were done from the RedHat laptop of Michael Tienmann.

First, Mike Reed presented the work and research of the UNU International Institute for Software Technology (in Macao) in software and in open source in particular.

The presentation slides are online.

Then Michael Tiemann from Red Hat, explained that developping software using a Free Software model was more effective and cheaper than doing it using the proprietary model. He emphasized the massive cost of the "proprietary" model and the high numbers of project failures. His conclusion was that Free Software for eGovernance was obviously the good way to do it. The book Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming was cited.

Scott McNeil, from UNU-IIST, presented the global desktop project. The goal of the project is to allow developing countries to participate in open source projects, and not just being simple users. (see his other presentation: Where the developers are that shows that most developers are not in developing countries).

Some reasons of non-participation he found:

  • english is the main language
  • open source development implies peer review and public criticism which is hard culturally to get used to
  • the group acceptance / rejection of project: open source is a meritocracy

One key solution is education and mentoring and that's what the global desktop project is trying to provide.

The presentation slides are online

Theresa Pardo, from the Center for Technology in Government , Univ. of Albany presented some notes on e-governance and technology from the "non-technical" point of view. Technology is rarely the problem, it's more the combination of Policy, Technology and Management that make the project hard.

The PowerPoint is online

Finally Tomasz Janowski, also from UNU -IIST, presented the e-Macao and the UNeGov.net projects. e-Macao is a pilot project to build a e-government in Macao. The experience is then shared by UNU through the UNeGov.net project, a community of practice for e-governance. Open Standards are as important, if not more, than Open Source.

The presentation slides are online.

A quick Q&A session followed with all the panelists, joined by Miguel de Icaza from Novell. Some questions asked: the assertion there is no "local support" for Open Source was criticiezed and the audience wanted clarifications (in relation to a slide during the eMacao project which was stating that "local support for Open Source was less present than for proprietary solutions"). The answer was "it depends of the country". Sri Lanka with the Lanka Software Foundation was cited as a counter example.

Answering a question about costs, Michael Tiemann talked about the VistA system, a health management system created in the USA and used in Finland and other countries, that illustrates the really low cost of a project once it's shared and reused. (More on the VistA Software Alliance website).

He also told the story of the Sahana project and how it helped to coordinate the Tsunami effort in Sri Lanka. (Sydney Morning Herald: Open source used for tsunami management system)

The Microsoft representant in the audience (big ah ah of the rest of the room when he introduced himself) commented that the price of the software is often a small part of the total cost of the project.

Miguel de Icaza and Michael Tiemann had a brief exchange of view on Miguel's opinion that an open source business is harder to do than a proprietary business for a small IT shop doing vertical software.

29 mars 2006