| Statement for 2020 Summit: Openness for Government - a national imperative Pia Waugh Openness as a default position for ICT innovation and development provides many clear opportunities and advantages. Clear leadership and assistance is necessary from the Australian Government so individuals and organisations from all sectors can make informed decisions how openness can benefit them. Open Standards help ensure interoperability and sustainable access to information. Open development models provide greater capacity for industry collaboration and higher return on investments through a shared load. Open Source provides an enormous wealth of mature, robust and trusted software from which Australian businesses, government and education can strategically source solutions. It provides key business benefits on which the ICT sector can build on the efforts of a global technology community to create new, innovative and globally competitive solutions. Our recommendations to the Government are as follows: 1) An Open Source resource(s) for public, business, education, government use The greatest issue around Open Source is market education. ICT users are unable to make an educated decision about appropriate technologies or ICT methodologies to leverage if they don't know the breadth of options. Open Source is vastly misunderstood in the market and this means potential productivity gains and innovation opportunities are lost daily. 2) More Open Source in education curriculum (school, TAFE, University) Students skilled in understanding concepts are far more adaptable (and valuable) than students that only understand specific products. To help this Open Source could accompany other software in schools for word processing, graphics and music. Open Source also provides a plethora of technologies to assist students in learning basic technical skills. This is vital because if Australian students only know existing products they struggle to be leaders in a digital economy and global market. Open Source skills are also vital in meeting the rapidly growing skills demand of the Open Source industry. 3) Open Standards - practical commitment The Australian Government have a policy commitment to Open Standards however practically do not yet fully comply to this policy as data and systems published on proprietary standards are still widespread. This creates digital lock-out for citizens and a sustainability problem. A more practical commitment to using Open Standards is necessary. 4) Clear policy and procurement guidelines The AGIMO Open Source Guide for Government was an excellent document, however it needs updating to make it more practical, with new case studies and support options for Government. This would assist agencies in leveraging Open Source that is fit for purpose and clear value for money. 5) Investment into Open Source R&D A recent study in Europe found that "increasing the FLOSS share of software investment from 20% to 40% would lead to a 0.1% increase in annual EU GDP growth excluding benefits within the ICT industry itself \226 i.e. over Euro 10 billion annually". This needs to be investigated in Australia, as well as trends in other countries (like the UK) where software created in research are Open Sourced and done collaboratively to increase the value of the research to society and industry more broadly. |
Last modified: Wednesday, 9 April 2008, 11:26 AM
