The Wisdom of the Conservatives

I don't have much time for either of the main UK political parties (or many of the others, come to that), but I must give some kudos to the Tories for latching onto an ironic weakness of Labour: its authoritarian hatred of openness. And here the former are at it again, showing the UK government how it should be done:

The Conservatives are today announcing a competition, with a £1million prize, for the best new technology platform that helps people come together to solve the problems that matter to them – whether that’s tackling government waste, designing a local planning strategy, finding the best school or avoiding roadworks.

This online platform will then be used by a future Conservative government to throw open the policy making process to the public, and harness the wisdom of the crowd so that the public can collaborate to improve government policy. For example, a Conservative government would publish all government Green Papers on this platform, so that everyone can have their say on government policies, and feed in their ideas to make them better.

This is in addition to our existing radical commitment to introduce a Public Reading Stage for legislation so that the public can comment on draft bills, and highlight drafting errors or potential improvements.

That said, the following is a bit cheeky:

Harnessing the wisdom of the crowd in this way is a fundamentally Conservative approach, based on the insight that using dispersed information, such as that contained within a market, often leads to better outcomes than centralised and closed systems.

Tories as bastions of the bottom-up approach? Stalin would have been proud of that bit of historical revisionism.

The only remaining question (other than whether the Conservatives will win the forthcoming UK General Election) is whether the software thus produced will be released under an open source licence. I presume so, since this would also be "a fundamentally Conservative approach"....

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Making Government IT Better - and Open

As I've noted many a time, the UK government has been one of the most backward when it comes to adopting open source solutions.

The fact that over the last few years it has started to make vague noises about doing so shows more that it's realised it looks pretty dumb compared to other governments as a consequence, not that it's serious about things. Indeed, it's still the case that closed-source software dominates government procurement. A leaked copy of the government's IT strategy has the following imaginative attempt to explain why that is...

On Open Enterprise blog.

"I've Never Voted Tory in My Life..."

....but next time I will if this proposal isn’t dropped.

Isn't it interesting how often we're hearing that refrain about ID cards....?

In the Blue Corner: Decentralisation...

Here's an interesting emergent meme:

An incoming Conservative government would decentralise health service computing and extend competition between suppliers, according to a plan released at its party conference.

The party's NHS Improvement Plan, released on 29 September 2008 by shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley, says the party will replace "Labour's centrally determined and unresponsive national IT system".

"Conservatives for decentralisation, Labour for centralisation": hmmm, might just work.

Let's Frame This...

....just in case they need reminding:

Dominic Grieve has said it is “high time” Labour abandon their "ill-fated" ID cards project after Jacqui Smith unveiled the design of ID cards for foreign nationals.

The Shadow Home Secretary stressed, “ID cards are an expensive white elephant that risk making us less - not more - safe.”

And he said the Government were “kidding themselves” if they think ID Cards for foreign nationals will protect against illegal immigration or terrorism - as they don't apply to those coming here for less than three months.

A Conservative Government would abandon the ID cards project, and Dominic said he hoped Labour had taken that into account when they negotiated the contracts.

“If they have not acted on this to protect the British taxpayer, it is reckless in the extreme at a time of heightened economic uncertainty.”

Open Source and UK Politics

The new dividing line between Labour and the Tories is less about a left-right split than about an authoritarian approach on one side and a more liberal one on the other. And Labour are on the wrong side of it. Many of their social and economic policies may have failed, but where they have succeeded is in developing a targeting, controlling, distrustful state. From the micromanagement of civil servants, teachers, doctors and the police, to ID cards, super databases and the growth of surveillance, the government's answer to too many problems has been the removal of autonomy from individuals and more oversight from Whitehall.

The Conservative analysis is that this over-controlling state is not only disastrously unpopular, it is also one of the key reasons why Labour, despite all its spending, has failed to achieve its goals. Endless supervision has been an expensive distraction, and has sapped energy and morale out of public life.

Amazing how the Conservatives are becoming the party of bottom-up openness - explicitly in the case of open source - and Labour seems determined to become its polar opposite.

ID Cards: Scandalous as Well as Idiotic

This is outrageous:

A Conservative government would have to compensate suppliers of the National Identity Scheme for lost profits as well as costs if it cancelled the project.

"To guarantee these payments knowing that a future Conservative government has already said it will scrap ID cards is improper and quite extraordinary," shadow home secretary David Davis MP told the Financial Times on 24 May 2008, citing the convention that one Parliament may not bind a subsequent one.

Davis wrote to the potential suppliers of the scheme in February, giving formal notice that the Tories would cancel the scheme if elected.

The Home Office told GC News that the contracts include break clauses, which if exercised would mean the government paying costs and an element of lost profits. "It's based on how far the contract has got and various other factors," a spokesperson said, adding that these were standard contractual arrangements following Office of Government Commerce guidelines.

The spokesperson added that "nothing has been created bespoke" to deal with the Conservatives' intentions, and that the figures involved in cancellation are commercially confidential.

In other words, the UK government is trying to use a kind of financial blackmail to keep its idiotic projects going: continue or cough up. And to add insult to injury, it cloaks its activities in secrecy. What a morally corrupt bunch.

Greenies Go Open

Pretty much a marriage made in heaven:

Open source software should be more widely available in order to help reduce the 'digital divide', according to Dr Caroline Lucas, Green MEP for the South East.

Dr Lucas has added her signature to a written declaration in the European Parliament - like an Early Day Motion (EDM) in the House of Commons - recognising the growing disparities in access to information and communication technologies throughout the European Union, and calling for increased use of open source technology.

She said: "The establishment of a digital divide is a new cause of social disparity which risks further excluding populations that are already vulnerable.

"New digital technologies have become an essential tool in all areas of life, including employment, education, and in personal leisure activities.

"European citizens have the right to freely access documents and information from the institutions which represent them, and it is about time that the use of open source software became more widespread.

"The European Union should take the necessary measures to help finance public research on open source software, and Parliament to switch its whole computer network to this type of technology.

Not that this is really a party issue: open source makes sense whatever your political persuasion, as David Cameron's increasing enthusiasm for it shows. Strange that only Labour doesn't get it: perhaps it's just too antithetical to its Stalinist positions on interception, internment without trial, ID cards, DNA databases et al.

You Know Open Source Has Really Arrived...

...when the two main political parties in the UK are squabbling over who is truer to the open source spirit:

David Cameron embraced Linux, open source and bottoms-up decision-making today as he detailed his vision of a Tory innovation policy in a speech at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

Cameron pledged that a Tory government would set the UK’s data free – but not in a bad way, like HMRC. Rather, he said, he wanted to ensure people could access information which allowed them to create “innovative applications that serve the public benefit”. This “information liberation” meant ensuring spending data was transparent for example, and that people could easily compare crime figures.

At the same time, he said, “We also want to see how open source methods can help overcome the massive problems in government IT programs”. Cameron said the Tories would reject Labour’s addiction to the mainframe model. Instead, he claimed, a Conservative government would follow private sector best practice and introduce open standards, “that enables IT contracts to be split up into modular components”.

...


Cameron’s pledge to open source comes just days after the minister for transformational government, Tom Watson, claimed that Labour is the party that really, you know, gets open source.

In his speech on Monday announcing the government’s Power of Information taskforce, he referred to an earlier speech where “I talked about the three rules of open source - one, nobody owns it. Two, everybody uses it. And three, anyone can improve it." He then recounted how the Tories immediately sent out an email “laying claim that in fact they are the ‘owners’ of these new ideas. I was accused of plundering policies from the Conservatives.”

Fight, fight, fight.

Welcome to Topsy-Turvy Land

So let me get this straight: Labour, party of the left, seems locked in a loving embrace with that arch-capitalist, Bill Gates, while the Conservatives, party of the right, is smitten with that commie open source stuff:

The government could save more than £600 million a year if it used more open source software, the shadow chancellor has estimated.

George Osborne said the savings would cut 5% off Whitehall's annual IT bill.

He called for a more "level playing field" for all software companies, and urged "cultural change" in government.