Why can't local government and open source be friends?

Spaghetti Junction in Birmingham ? the website planning process followed a similar route ... Photograph: Jason Hawkes / Getty

You've got to love the Freedom of Information act. Especially its ability to show, in stark terms, quite how badly local government can screw up.

Yes, Birmingham City Council, I'm afraid I'm looking at you.

Heather Brooke, who kicked off the whole MP's expenses thing, made an FOI request to Birmingham CC about a website it was building.

And what do you know? The price of the site went from a budgeted ?580,000 in summer 2005 to, um, ?2.8m by the latest estimate.

It was also late. That may have been prompted by worries inside the council that it might be the subject of ridicule; this not being helped by the fact that just when it was due to go live in March, someone spotted that it couldn't handle pound or euro signs, nor apostrophes or quotation marks. (When the 10,000 pages were migrated from the old system to the new one, those characters - and the one immediately following - got deleted.)

It is an ambitious project, essentially trying to knit 35 sites operating under the council's umbrella into a single one. But its costs ballooned madly.

You may not know whether to laugh or cry at this, though I suspect the council tax payers of Birmingham have something else in mind involving pitchforks and flaming torches. Although the plan was for the site to go live this week, it hasn't.

It would be nice to think that the failure to write a specification where non-alphanumeric characters aren't recognised is a complete one-off in government. Unfortunately, it's not: as I discovered for myself a couple of years back when using the Department of Work and Pensions site, the testing there had never considered (a) that someone might access it using any other machine than one running Windows (b) that they might hit the "return" key to create new paragraphs.

Thus filling in a form with roughly 60 pages, quite a few of which required multi-paragraph answers, led to a perplexing failure to work, not once but twice. It took a lot of very long and frustrating phone calls until the DWP folk managed to recreate the problem. The staff couldn't have been more willing to help, but their hands were tied by the fact that they hadn't written the specification, and so had to play detective to figure out what was wrong.

However, the Birmingham case does look egregrious. And who's the partner building the site? It turns out to be a joint venture between Birmingham CC and Capita - which has a long history of making good money from central and local government contracts. Capita runs the TV Licensing scheme, it runs the congestion charge system on behalf of Transport for London, and it also runs the training for a number of local councils using the "Voice Risk Analysis" system - described by one scientist as being "at the astrology end of the validity spectrum", which hasn't stopped the government spending more than ?2m on it. Specifically, the DWP has funded the system - at councils including Birmingham. A remarkable coincidence, you'll agree.

The trouble is that the website never stood a chance. Nobody seems to have stood up in a meeting and said: "You know, there's lots of very good open source content management systems (CMS) out there - there's one called Wordpress which is free and eminently customisable." This is peculiar, as Wordpress was available (and as solid as any CMS) in 2005, runs on MySQL and PHP (which are both free products used by some of the largest companies in the world, such as airlines and Yahoo). And there are pots of programmers around with MySQL and PHP skills.

Even when the project ran into difficulty, in December 2007 (scroll down the timeline there) they still could have changed. Wordpress was being adopted more and more widely in central government: a growing number of government departments use it for their blogs, including Downing Street.

Why wasn't it good enough for Birmingham? It seems that there's a prevailing mindset in some parts of local and central government that thinks that if you (actually, taxpayers) aren't paying through the nose, then you're not getting value for money.

Not true, of course; ask Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, or any of those other big sites that rely on free software. (I once asked Chris DiBona of Google how much it would cost to run the company on Windows rather than Linux. Thousands and thousands of stripped-down PCs... put the cost at "hundreds of millions" of dollars.)

That's not to say that it's a bad idea to have council websites; it's a very good idea, as Lincolnshire CC points out:

If we turned off our web services? 177,000 visitors per month (May 2009 figures) to our web site would find no web site.

If only 10% of these visitors were to contact us by phone - say 17,000 ? then we would incur an extra cost of approx ?51,000 per month (based on Socitm's costs of phone contact).

That's why there's now a group aimed at local and central government - ukgovoss - started by Public Sector Forums, an independent organisation, which is trying to educate the people inside councils - particularly those in charge of the IT departments and those just above - about the potential benefits of open source.

It's also produced a report looking at attitudes among local authority IT managers and staff to open source products in government. It's encouraging, though also scary: software licensing can be 30%-40% of a council's budget; cost is the reason for going with OSS for 75%; and 64% think their council will increase its use of OSS.

There's no mention of whether Birmingham was trying to use OSS in its project - though I think that the fact that the FOI responses were in Microsoft .doc format may be telling.

In the next few years, we should be seeing more adoption of open source by local government; there's a huge open goal as Windows 7 comes along for the introduction of OpenOffice for most tasks rather than Microsoft Office, with potentially large cost savings (the Guardian has been using OpenOffice throughout the newspaper since December last year).

Whether it will be enough to recoup Birmingham's extra costs isn't clear. Perhaps the next FOI request should be to get the minutes from the meeting to find out which software was considered for the CMS. Anyone fancy a go?

Cite From：http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/07/local-government-open-source-birmingham-website-costs