UK

In the New Year the UK Government (alongside other British Commonwealth governments) issues a list of honours, giving official recognition of work in the public sphere. The guardian has two articles, on the teachers and scientists honoured this year.

 

cheers

stuart

BECTA (the body responsible for IT in compulsory education in the UK) has come under attack over their approach to open source on two fronts.

An early day motion in the commons, supported by 1 in 5 backbench MPs said:

That this House [...] expresses concern that Becta and the Department for Education and Skills, through the use of outdated purchasing frameworks, are effectively denying schools the option of benefiting from both free and open source software and the value and experience small and medium ICT companies could bring to the schools market.

A report by Sirius found that:

Becta cannot account for over £200m of taxpayer's money spent on software for schools

Sirius is hardly an independent third party in this, but their figures are based on FOI act requests and seem to add up. What Sirius want is a change in the way IT money is allocated so that more open source gets used.

The UK National Audit Office have delivered a report on "Delivering successful IT-enabled business change" in which they examine a number of successful IT projects and compare them to the ones that were less successful. I won't comment on how low they set the bar for successful IT projects, nor examine why only two successful UK government project are in the hundred million-pound range and none are in the ten-billion-pound range of the unravelling NHS fiasco. What I will quote is point four of the Executive Summary:

Analysis of our case studies identified three key and recurring themes in successful programmes and projects:

• the level of engagement by senior decision makers of the organisations concerned;
• organisations’ understanding of what they needed to do to be an "intelligent client; and
• their understanding of the importance of determining at the outset what benefits they were aiming to achieve and, importantly, how programmes and projects could be actively managed to ensure these benefits were optimised.

In other words senior managers don't what to think about the projects, aren't willing to talk about how they should work and have no idea of the problems they're trying to solve.

Liberal Democrat John Pugh MP has put forward an early day motion congratulating the Open University on it's use of open source:

That this House congratulates the Open University and other schools, colleges and universities for utilising free and open source software to deliver cost-effective educational benefit not just for their own institutions but also the wider community; and expresses concern that Becta and the Department for Education and Skills, through the use of outdated purchasing frameworks, are effectively denying schools the option of benefiting from both free and open source and the value and experience small and medium ICT companies could bring to the schools market.

Presumably this is Moodle he's talking about.

cheers, stuart

EGovernment in the UK is ten years old

For all the talk of radical reform, however, government bureaucracy of 2006 is much the same as it was when the Spice Girls were in the charts. The latest rebranding of the e-revolution, under the name Transformational Government, is wrestling with the same questions raised by Government Direct - how to orient services around the user, how to authenticate citizens' identities electronically and how to share data in a legal and ethical way.

cheers stuart

The JISC have refreshed their website, introducing RSS goodness and greatly increasing the ability to find information about programmes, projects and services, such as OSS Watch. Their RSS feed of funding opportunities is likely to be especially well subscribed.

Unfortunately the RSS is write only, and the new JISC website appears to make no use of the many quality feeds that their services produce.

blog.ac.uk  was held on friday,  a gathering of blog-minded people in education from across the UK.

My pictures are up, unfortunately the event blog is  password protected.

Thanks to Josie for getting the momentum up and JISC / CETIS / CDE for the sponsorship.

IBM and the UK Cabinet office are working together to increase the security of a number of open source tools. The primary tools are WebSphere and Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) , built on Linux and Tomcat, Eclipse and Cloudscape respectively. SELinux has already attracted sustained investment from the American National Security Agency (NSA) and is a tool for raising the confidentiality and integrity capabilities. In short it removes the requirement for any user to have complete control over the system, allowing for separation of operational, logging, security and overview, for example.

As far as I can tell, IBM is expending all this effort to give it good marks when tendering for government IT contracts. Personally I'd rather see them start at the other end, working with units within government getting them to specify their tenders in a meaningful way.

The UK Patent Office has launched a new Mediation Service in an attempt to settle IPR disputes without expensive court proceedings:

If both sides agree to mediation, the mediator will meet with each side, separately and together, to discuss the issues involved. When the main issues are identified it is then hoped that the dispute can be settled. There are no fixed results in mediation and both sides must agree on what the solution is to be. It is worth remembering that the mediator is a facilitator and does not make a decision; that is down to the opposing parties. The discussions are "without prejudice" that is they are not binding and parties can continue with proceeding if mediation fails.

Unfortunately, this is a model that requires both of the parties to be well behaved and doesn't address situations such as the SCO case in which parties appear to be essentially using blackmail tactics. It also does not address any of the structural issues with the current patent regime, such as the ever expanding scope of patents and the disproportionate amount of power apparently held by the holders of large incumbents.