Innovation in Software

OK, so I’m having some fun with the title. This is Part III (the final part, you’ll be pleased to hear) of my write-up about the Open Schools Alliance even last week. Part I and Part II are worth a look if you just got here.

First up straight after the break was Liberal Democrat MP for Southport, John Pugh. This particular Honourable Member is well-known to those of us on the open source side of the digital divide: he has a habit of asking what must be for the mandarins on the receiving end really annoying questions of the government about their IT procurement policies. He has a particular interest in IT in schools as he himself started out as a teacher, but in recent years has found an ally in Private Eye for his questioning in the House around the tax credits fiasco and other IT blunders.

He made the argument that the government is progressively getting worse at procurement in that it’s not learning from its mistakes. He argued that many within government departments are unaware of what open source is, are unaware of what it can do, or what it can save. The quote for me from this session was “whilst the government have a road building programme, they don’t argue roads must be built so that they may only accomodate Fords”.

It seemed to me though, that his real bugbear was open standards more than open source – it is the fact we’re producing systems that lock us into a vendor for a lifetime that is causing us problems.

We then moved into a panel discussion featuring John, Ian Lynch, Mark Taylor, Mike Partridge and our strawman for the day, Dr. Stephen Lucy of BECTA.

This discussion ultimately came down to panellists and the audience expressing dismay at BECTA’s attitude towards OSS, and how they were allowing for the propping up of what can be described as state aid of Microsoft. I was quite impressed by how Dr Lucy handled the situation, but was informed by another attendee later that this was characteristic of how he worked – he would attend these events and “play a dead bat” to the air of hostility. I can’t blame him, but BECTA are going to have to realise that it’s going to get worse unless they start looking at how to bring open source into the mix.

There are huge issues around OSS and IT procurement in general – probably more urgent in education than anywhere else – and it’ll be interesting to see the direction the Open Schools Alliance.

There needs to be a shift from centralised procurement to bottom-up organisation, but even with centralised projects like CLEO it has been shown OSS can provide amazing value for money. If BECTA were willing to play ball a little, who knows how much more great software we could see in classrooms over the next few years? As it is, it feels to me like a few senior players in BECTA are positioning themselves for consultancy positions in Microsoft and WebCT.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be interesting to watch, and I only hope that eventually parents and teachers see sense, and give the OSA all the support they need.