Open Government, Open Data, Open Source, Trust, and Truth
Everyone likes to complain. I am guessing because issuing complaints is a basic human need. In fact, taken at face value, it is a Human Right.
But especially about the government (and the tax department in particular, but that is a story for another time).
Government has an obligation to be there for the people. It has an obligation to tell the people -- who are basically their shareholders -- what it is doing, where their money is spent on, and what a citizen might expect when going gets tough.
All government should be transparent, but opening any history book, or taking a look just across a border or two, tells a different story. Power corrupts, and very often we see the books are closed for the very people who pay the wages of those in power.
This article aims to give a little insight into efforts across the world to make government a little more open, enable governments to share data relevant to citizens, and software more accessible, more free, and more secure. This will lead up to explaining about what open source software (OSS) is, and how both citizens and companies might profit from opening up digital tools.
I will use two of my favourite cities in the world as examples of how open government, open data, and open source are put to use: my home town Christchurch New Zealand, and my long-time residence Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Let's start by explaining what is meant by Open Government.
Open government is an umbrella term for the practice of opening up to citizens about governmental processes and decision-making.
Countries have come together on this subject in the Open Government Partnership (OGP). This organisation has set itself the task of promoting open governance across 75 countries worldwide, including 24 EU member states. Both Netherlands and New Zealand are members.
Open Government is more a philosophy than a direct todo-list of actions. It is through National Action Plans, that OGP members set specific goals for increased transparency, anti-corruption, and civic engagement, and in so doing, creating an environment where citizens can trust their government’s intentions and operations. Opening up data is one of these measures.
Open Data is Open Government In Action
In Christchurch, the spendings on everything related to the urban environment is made available through the Spatial Open Data Portal, of which a slightly enhanced screenshot is visible below. All the expenditures are listed in this tool, even gates that are paid for by the council.
In Amsterdam, there is a similar service. Looking a little smarter, it provides information on every item the citizens of Amsterdam have paid for through city council. Even the trees are listed. Here is the tree in front of our office in Amsterdam West.
While these examples might seem trivial, they do demonstrate government's dedication to opening up to the public.
Government, By Definition, is Public
Being a public body, city councils and higher-level governmental bodies are obliged to let the public visit their proceedings in person. So there are most always members of the public present at meetings on every level of government.
In Amsterdam, the meetings of the municipal council are public, except when personal matters are involved or when the municipal council decides to do so with two-thirds majority.
In Christchurch, all Council and Council Committee meetings are open to the public, with the exception of "closed session" meeting items. Members of the public may comment on agenda items either at Council Committee meetings or Council meetings.
This obligation also means that and minutes and documentation of meetings are to be made public. Such as this presentation which was done before the Christchurch Council Water Board just a few days ago.
Same in Amsterdam. Citizens can download documents that have been produced for council meetings. This one is about how Amsterdam plans to handle urban conservation and urban improvement in the coming years.
The Open Government philosophy expands upon the basic obligations of every public body
The Open Government philosophy expands on the basic obligations of every public body by making it their explicit policy to get the trust of the public. In other words, they go out of their way to make every single interaction within government public.
One of the ways they can do that is to tape and publish all meetings.
Here is a listing of a meeting by members of the Amsterdam City Council, where every meeting is taped and published. At this point a member is asking why mooring your little boat in the famous Amsterdam canals has gotten so expensive.
Same in Christchurch.
I know what you're thinking. What about the stuff that is going on behind closed doors. Yes, that could still happen. What if the members get into a huge fight? Well, we have actually seen that happen. The reason we see it is because the meetings are broadcast in real time.
So, Open Government is the philosophy behind Open Data. It expands upon the obligation of every governmental body to simply allow the public to attend meetings.
Amsterdam includes the following categories as part of it's Open Data effort:
And now for the Open Data effort of Christchurch:
How Does Open Source Help Open Government?
What does Open Source Software (OSS) have to offer in the context of Open Government and Open Data?
Before we start on that, let's take a look at what OSS means.
Open source software means that the source code of the programs on your computer, or programs that are running online platforms, are available for you or anyone else to view, review and reuse. That also means that you could download this programs and modify, if you had the needed skillset. And if you didn't possess the needed skills, you could ask someone to help you who did.
What about security, you might ask.
If I can view and review, who is to stop nefarious actors from changing the source code and introducing viruses? Well, for starters, it doesn't work like that. Also, the fact that source code is available doesn't mean that it is what you get on your computer.
The source code of open source software is read-only. So while it is available to copy, and someone may create their own version, the original will remain untouched.
Changes are made only by trusted developers, and are reviewed before they are merged.
Furthermore, for a program such as a text editor to work on your computer, it needs to be released in a suitable format. Before a new release happens, a second, third, fourth, etc, review is done to make sure that all changes work together as expected.
On top of that, in almost all cases, widely used open source software programs are overseen by a distinct entity. That might be a for-profit company, or an entity such as a foundation.
An example: LibreOffice.
Libre means "Free" -- there is a poignant story to tell that I will do in a minute.
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LibreOffice is a suite of office applications that somewhat emulates (and partly outdoes) Microsoft Office. What is needed in the office is no rocket science: a capable text editor, a spreadsheet program, a slide deck program. And programs for creating diagrams, and drawings. LibreOffice has all of these, in a state of the art user interface. On top of that, included is a database program similar to Microsoft Access, and a program for creating math formulae. There are 200 million active LibreOffice users worldwide.
LibreOffice data formats are compatible with a wide range of proprietary and open source programs, with a surprising number of deprecated programs in the (very long) list of compatibilities. Even AppleWorks is supported, which was abandoned by Apple in 2007.
And of course, there is extensive interoperability with Microsoft Office. It runs on Windows, Mac, and a variety of Unix platforms, with availability for iOS iPadOS, and Android through third parties.
One of the presumptions that are heard a lot is that open source software is free.
Yes, sometimes it is true that payment is not required. LibreOffice, for example, can be downloaded free of charge.
But, as it is often quoted: "open source software is free as in speech, but not free as in beer."
What is meant is that while anyone may download the source code, it is often not useful for casual users. WordPress, for example, is open source, and while anyone may download it and run and host it from their own computer, most choose to pay a hosting provider, and, especially if using the eCommerce tools, an all-in-one solution.
The backstory to the rise of LibreOffice is a case in point.
LibreOffice started as a product called StarOffice in 1985, being written by the then 16 year old Marco B?rries, from Germany. It went through different iterations, and had considerable success. At its peak the company that was created to develop and market the product, Star Division, boasted 170 employees.
In 1998, StarOffice was made free of charge for private users. Note, not made open source. It only went open source after Star Division was acquired by Sun Microsystems a year later, and StarOffice became OpenOffice (dot org).
Sun Microsystems was taken over by Oracle around 2010, and from then on things get murky. Oracle donated the codebase to Apache, features from Lotus 1-2-3 were merged in because IBM, the owner of Lotus Software had a stake in it. Oracle does not have a good name in the open source world, and proved them right by not moving forward with the development of OpenOffice, frustrating developers and users.
Soon after the takeover, when it became clear that Oracle would do nothing to further the cause of OpenOffice, the non-profit entity The Document Foundation (TDF) was registered in Germany, and LibreOffice became the new name, using a fork of the OpenOffice codebase. Most OpenOffice users quickly moved to LibreOffice, which from then on became by far the most active community.
How to make a profit when your software is open source?
So you see from this example that during the development from StarOffice, and passing through the OpenOffice period, LibreOffice moved from being proprietary software to freeware (free of charge, but closed source) to open source. All the time businesses were earning money from the software, but in different ways. Technical support and maintenance, providing training programs, consulting services for clients who need integration with other systems, to name a few. LibreOffice itself is led by the non-profit TDF, which had expenditures of just under two million euro's in 2023.
But looking at the total LibreOffice ecosystem, you might be surprised at how much revenue is made from training, consulting, custom development, and technical support contracts. A conservative estimate, given that just half of the 200 million active users of LibreOffice were to be employees of an organisation (such as a municipality, or a company) is ten billion dollars per year. That might be anything in the region of a staggering 80 billion if all users were to be in organisations.
So what is going on in our two cities, Amsterdam and Christchurch, regarding open source?
In Amsterdam, we will give the example of an open source business system for municipalities called OpenZaak (a "zaak" in this context means "file"). So this is a system that enables employees of municipalities to track files they are responsible for.
An example: employee Jan is tasked with arranging for fire safety inspections. There are a number of small companies for which she knows that they need regular fire safety inspections.
One of which is a bar in a side alley off the main shopping street. So she starts a file on this bar, listing information such as the address, the name of the owner and their phone number and email address, and other particulars. She also assigns a task to an inspector who shall carry out the inspection. Let's call the inspector Peter.
The inspection is scheduled, and after Peter has completed it, the report is made up and sent to Jan to save in the system. All correspondence, be it hardcopy or email, is also kept in this file. Should Jan fall ill, or leave her job, another employee can take over immediately.
What is the importance of open source in this story?
It could go like this: to actually execute the inspection, it would be helpful if Peter did not need to rely on a paper checklist on a clipboard to do the inspection. Because after the inspection they would need to sit at their computer to type out a report.
What would help is an app on a handheld device, which would offer a digital version of the checklist. But to be really efficient, the relevant information in the file would have to be automatically pushed to the app, so that, when the schedule for the inspection comes up, Peter would do the inspection on the app, and the resulting report would be pushed back to Jan automatically once it is done.
This is all possible using proprietary systems. But what makes open source a great choice is that a municipality does not need to wait for the vendor of the proprietary system to gather together enough clients to make it worth their while to add these features. Because it just so happens the municipality has in-house developers who can build out the system to accomodate for these extra features. They can modify their version of the system themselves, and even request to merge the new features back into the master branch, and in so doing, helping other municipalities tasked with similar inspections.
Open source software helps local government by allowing them to tailor their business systems to their own needs, without the delay -- and the cost -- of getting custom softwre solutions done by vendors of proprietary software. Instead, they can do changes in-house, or choose any other trusted company to do the changes.
For Christchurch, an example in a different context.
In New Zealand, there is a group that is called the Citizens Advice Bureau. This is a non-profit that helps citizens with issues that effect their day-to-day lives. Things like consumer rights, starting a small business, housing, heath and much more.
They recently launched a website called BenefitMe which specifically focusses on citizens who have lost their way in the maze of rules and regulations, and a therefore not getting the care they deserve.
This is a quote from the "about" page on the benefitme website.
Governments are supposed to exist for the benefit of the people and communities they serve. So how did we get to a point where it has become so difficult, traumatic and even shameful to seek help when we’re at our most vulnerable?
This website is meant for people who are looking for ways to get help without presenting themselves to clerks at a reception desk. The get-started page gives an example:
What is interesting about BenefitMe in the context of open source software is that is was built using OpenFisca. This very interesting digital tool is an open-source engine to write rules, such as articles of law, into code. It was developed in France at the request of the French Government, and is used across the world by countries such as Japan, UK, USA, Mali, and New Zealand.
Having personal experience of going through large amounts of legalese for one of our projects I for one would be greatly helped with such a tool.
It works by converting a body of tax and benefit rules into an OpenFisca model. For BenefitMe this means that the body of law relating to the New Zealand tax and benefit system are translated into code and therefore a user of BenefitMe can get back whatever benefits might apply to them, simply by entering some details.
The seemingly relevant portion of "rules as code" looks like this:
class social_security_regulation__eligible_for_childcare_subsidy(Variable):
value_type = bool
entity = Person
definition_period = MONTH
label = u"Eligibility of child for payment of childcare subsidy"
reference = u"https://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/2004/0268/latest/DLM282545.html"
def formula(persons, period, parameters):
is_citizen_or_resident = persons('is_citizen_or_resident', period)
normally_in_nz = persons("social_security__is_ordinarily_resident_in_new_zealand", period)
income_below_threshold = persons.family("social_security_regulation__household_income_below_childcare_subsidy_threshold", period)
is_principal_carer = persons.has_role(Family.PRINCIPAL_CAREGIVER)
under_5_years_28_days_not_attending_school = persons.family(
'social_security_regulation__family_has_resident_child_under_5_not_in_school', period)
is_5_and_will_be_enrolled = persons.family(
'social_security_regulation__family_has_resident_child_aged_5_who_will_be_enrolled_in_school', period)
under_6_with_disability_allowance = persons.family(
'social_security_regulation__family_has_child_eligible_for_disability_allowance_child_under_6', period)
return is_citizen_or_resident * normally_in_nz * is_principal_carer * income_below_threshold * \
(under_5_years_28_days_not_attending_school
+ is_5_and_will_be_enrolled + under_6_with_disability_allowance)
Why is open source important for the BenefitMe project?
By it's very nature, this project must be open source or it would lose it's credibility. Anyone must be able to check out the source code of the Aotearoa New Zealand package at github (or ask a friendly dev to) so as to assess the veracity of the translation of New Zealand law into the OpenFisca model. This is why the translation is represented not in a database format, but in a format that, while not easily readable by laypeople, is in fact very clear for anyone used to writing and reading code in any programming language.
Open source helps organisations and governments by delivering shared resources and encouraging the implementation on a local level. OpenFisca is a prime example, because the work it has done to set up its modelling system can be easily replicated in the context other the rules, regulations, and articles of law of most countries.
To close off:
Thank you for reading this far. I hope I have made the relationship between Open Government, Open Data and Open Source a little bit more clear.
I think that trust escapes quantification, but if the intent of government is to be honest, transparent and truthful, they will move policy towards gaining the trust of their citizens.
Truth is another of those big words. I really don't know if open source is going to solve the problems of distrust in government that we are hearing so much about in the last years. But what I feel is that if we can at least trust that government, actually all corporate bodies, are bound to rules, regulations, and articles of law that oblige them to be transparent and open about their proceedings, we are on the way, if not to more truth being told, then at least to more trust in the people we have elected to lead us.