[DMCA-Activists] Newsforge: UK Seminar Leads to Forum for FOSS Interests

[Seth Johnson]

> http://business.newsforge.com/business/05/12/13/1814250.shtml?tid=110


Seminar leads to ongoing forum for UK FOSS interests

By: Bruce Byfield

Thursday December 22, 2005 (07:00 PM GMT)


When Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli agreed to deliver a seminar on "Open
Source in Government" to parliamentary staff members and
representatives of local government in the United Kingdom earlier
this month, he planned to introduce his audience to some basic
concepts. However, when he got there, he found that most of the
audience was already familiar with the concepts. As a result,
instead of educating people in public life, he may have done more
than he hoped -- he may have helped to create an ongoing forum in
which the free and open source software (FOSS) communities,
political lobbyists, and members of the governing Labour Party
and the opposition Conservative Party can work together to
promote the use of FOSS in the governments of the United Kingdom.

The seminar was held on December 1 at Portcullis House, an office
and conference complex for British Members of Parliament and
their staff. Sponsored by Dr. Andrew Murrison, Conservative
Member of Parliament (MP) for Westbury, the seminar attracted a
broad range of political interests. In addition to employees of
both Conservative and Labour MPs, the audience included people
with ties to Chelgate Limited, a major English PR and public
affairs firm; the London Regional Council of the Confederation of
British Industry, a well-known lobbying organization; Eurim, a
technology lobbying group; mySociety, a organization to promote
the use of the Internet in the public and non-profit sectors;
Open Forum Europe, an advocacy group for FOSS; The Real Time
Club, a high-tech networking society; and the UK Unix User Group.
In short, members represented a broad cross-section of people
interested in the role of technology in government.

Al-Ubaydli, the speaker for the seminar, is a medical doctor with
a degree from Cambridge. Already interested in computing,
Al-Ubaydli decided while serving his residency at Queen Elizabeth
Hospital at King's Lynn that "my computing skills were useful for
much more than research." After graduating in 2000, Al-Ubaydli
designed software for handheld computers for Cambridge medical
students and wrote Handheld Computers for Doctors.

In 2003 Al-Ubaydli became a Visiting Research Fellow at the
National Library of Medicine in the United States. There, John
Knight, an active member of the Washington area FOSS community,
encouraged his interest in the subject. One result of this
interest is the book Free Software for Busy People , an
introduction to FOSS that has been praised by Cory Doctrow and
Eric S. Raymond, and translated into Spanish, Mexican, and
Chinese.

In addition, Al-Ubaydli is co-founder of Medical Futures, a
company concerned with intellectual property issues in medicine,
and Medical Approaches, a non-profit organization that provides
free electronic textbooks in medicine. He currently works at the
National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Md.

Al-Ubaydli stresses that he delivered his talk on "Open Source
Software for Government" in none of these capacities, but rather
as a private citizen.

The presentation

Al-Ubaydli's presentation is now available online. For members of
the FOSS communities, much of it is familiar, from his definition
of open source and his debunking of myths about it to his point
that, if you have used the Internet, you have used FOSS without
knowing it.

What may be less familiar are the examples Al-Ubaydli used, and
his call for action at the end. Both were carefully chosen to
appeal to policy makers and policy influencers, as well, at
times, as their national pride.

One example that Al-Ubaydli gave was the response to the tsunami
in southeast Asia in early 2005. According to Al-Ubaydli, the
software used to organize relief efforts in Sri Lanka was
developed as an open source project with the assistance of IBM,
and is now widely used by the United Nations. Similarly, the
first charity to help earthquake victims in Pakistan used open
source software for both its affordability and reliability. "The
benefits of these developments flow back to our societies,"
Al-Ubaydli said. "And non-governmental organizations realise
this."

In addition, Al-Ubaydli stress the transparency of FOSS -- the
fact that users can confirm that the software did what it was
supposed to do and nothing else, contrasting it with users'
inability to know whether an application such as Skype really
does protect their security.

Returning to this point later in the presentation, Al-Ubaydli
brought the issue of transparency closer to home by commenting on
the case of Helen Wilkinson, which was discussed in the British
Parliament in June 2005. According to Al-Ubaydli, despite
Wilkinson's experience with bureaucracy and the cooperation of
government officials, she was unable to remove the erroneous
claim in her medical health records that she was an alcoholic.

The new system for medical health records that caused Wilkinson's
problem were built with proprietary software. Had open source
software been used instead, Al-Ubaydli suggested, the National
Health Service might have been able to track down the problem
successfully. Instead, after months of effort, Wilkinson withdrew
from the National Health Service.

Without the transparency that open source can provide, Al-Ubaydli
predicted, in the near future, "There will likely be a backlash.
This would mean that the tremendous and worth investment in
electronic medical records in which Britain is leading the world
will be reversed because of lack of faith in the system. Patients
will demand to be removed just as Ms. Wilkinson did." In other
words, the transparency of FOSS might prevent the loss of public
faith in major British institutions -- an issue that the current
Labour government is actively grappling with. Certainly the
issue, Al-Ubaydli observed after the seminar, seemed of
particular interest to his audience.

Britain, Al-Ubaydli went on to note, is far behind most of Europe
in FOSS adaptation. According to Al-Ubaydli, only 32 percent of
local English governments use FOSS, compared to 71 percent in
France, 68 percent in Germany, and 58 percent in Holland.

In conclusion, Al-Ubaydli asked his audience to do three things.
If nothing else, he asked them not to hinder FOSS by supporting
software patents. More actively, he asked them to encourage
competition in government software purchases, and to avoid
exclusive deals with proprietary companies such as Microsoft.
Finally, speaking as a taxpayer, he asked them to adapt FOSS to
save money and raise the quality of government resources at the
same time. Like much of his talk, these final calls to action
were an explanation of ideas common in the FOSS communities
expressed in language designed to appeal to his audience.

The discussion

The discussion after the presentation was chaired by Nick
Wood-Dow, an IT specialist at Chelgate Limited. The topics raised
were far-ranging. Most, however, dealt at least indirectly with
how to encourage the use of FOSS in public affairs -- a tendency
that some of the audience apparently thought inevitable.

Omar Salem, co-author of Wide Open , a book that advocates using
FOSS as part of the solution to social problems, commented that
"the politics of open source software are one of the issues that
needs to be tackled. The OSS community needs to think of clear
and compelling ways to explain to politicians and normal people
why OSS is good."

Another attendee, Basil Cousins of Open Forum Europe agrees,
saying, "We urgently need to work out how to communicate with
others who generally have no interest or knowledge in open
source."

According to Salem, the general feeling was that the educational
process would be an uphill battle. Other members of the audience,
he reports, said that "they knew of no more that 10 Members of
Parliament who could be said to have an interest in OSS."

At this point, Cousins reports, the discussion turned to
practical ways to raise awareness. Leslie Fletcher of the UK Unix
User's Group raised the issue of FOSS education. Cousins himself
mentioned that the Open Source Academy, funded by the Office of
the Deputy Prime Minister, is currently developing accreditation
programs for open source.

Others discussed ways in which the FOSS communities could work
with parliament. According to Cousins, Andrew Murrison suggested
a "formal independent review" or a parliamentary open forum that
would bring Members of Parliament together with members of the
public to discuss both general FOSS solutions and specific issues
in education and health.

By the end of the seminar, attendees had agreed to respond as a
group to the government's request for responses to the Department
of Constitutional Affair's Transforming Public Services
discussion paper by the February 3, 2006, deadline. The goals of
this paper include "to deliver better services for the public"
and "to ensure that the faith the public have in government is
improved," making it an ideal vehicle for increasing awareness of
FOSS. The group will meet in late January when Al-Ubaydli next
visits London.

Meanwhile, simply by getting together to discuss their common
interests rather than their differences, the seminar attendees
may have made an important contribution to the cause of FOSS in
the United Kingdom.

Bruce Byfield is a course designer and instructor, and a computer
journalist who writes regularly for NewsForge.

-- 

RIAA is the RISK!  Our NET is P2P!
http://www.nyfairuse.org/action/ftc

DRM is Theft!  We are the Stakeholders!

New Yorkers for Fair Use
http://www.nyfairuse.org

[CC] Counter-copyright: http://realmeasures.dyndns.org/cc

I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or
distribution of this incidentally recorded communication. 
Original authorship should be attributed reasonably, but only so
far as such an expectation might hold for usual practice in
ordinary social discourse to which one holds no claim of
exclusive rights.