Opinion: Local government don't get open source

Despite the savings local governments could realise from using open source software, Simon Moores is sceptical that they will ever be savvy enough to take advantage of the technology.

I'm having an open source moment - again!

This week our re-shuffled government will have to ponder news from the British Educational Communications and Technology Association (BECTA) that UK primary schools might save as much as half of their IT budget by moving to open source software.

Elsewhere open source is beginning to gain small footholds in local government and the eGov monitor reports that software called Groupserver is now available to help councils establish online forums focused specifically on local issues at little to no cost. The Brighton & Hove Council and the London Borough of Newham are undergoing pilot projects with the software, which is released under the Gnu Public Licence.

But hold on a moment - open source aside, is local government really that enthusiastic over the concept of citizen online forums? Close to despair over my own local council's limited grasp of the internet, I've started my own local news and opinions portal. Inside three months it's close to becoming a full-time job and is making both my local council and local newspaper a little twitchy as visitor traffic grows thanks to some help from local radio and Google.

Where I live in Kent, respect for local government is not high, as represented by a reader comment posted on my website: "Anarchy without taxation would be better than the institutional denial of service we currently experience and pay so much for."

The sad fact of the matter is that local government here and in many other deprived areas of the country has visibly little or no interest in the internet as a serious communications medium. This may be for a number of different reasons. The council workforce isn't internet literate and the bulk of the population fall on the wrong side of the digital divide, for instance. And with only two men to clear a hundred square miles of public space of litter, there's no money for fancy social experiments, online or otherwise.

If my local council was to use this free open source solution to improve their limited online presence, they would need to employ someone who understood it and could monitor the results. That's money that might be better spent elsewhere. When I set up a similar forum at the Office of the e-Envoy, it cost £40,000 in time, even with free Lotus Notes software and support from IBM. In the end, the Office gave up trying to deal with the volume of comments, complaints and suggestions and canned the project.

In the end, this isn't simply an open source issue; it's a money and imagination issue. Based on the comments from my own local portal, local government is still inclined to use the internet as a one-way publishing medium that keeps customers at a distance. Simply changing telephone numbers or correcting information online appears to involve massive administrative effort which moves at glacial speed.

Many councils, particularly those inside the reach of the M25, may have the resources, budget and will to experiment with online forum projects. But I suspect many more will simply carry on doing what they have always done, leaving local communities wondering whether they exist simply to pay larger and larger taxes and parking charges.

It may well be that this particular open source moment will pass most of them by.