Government

The AODA Customer Service Standard & Ontario's Public Sector Websites

mgifford — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:33:05 -0400

Ontario implemented the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) in 2005 and in January 2010 it will begin to enhance the level of services that people in this province can expect from their governments.

Organizations Needing to Comply

The public sector organizations that now must meet the Customer Service Standard include Ontario government ministries, municipalities, school boards, community colleges, universities, public hospitals, public transportation organizations as well as some other agencies. All other organizations with over a year will have another two years before they need to conform to this standard.

The web has become a huge part of how people communicate and this act will significantly affect how organizations think about their online presence in the months to come. It is anticipated that websites by the organizations above will be required to reach compliance levels A of WCAG 2.0 (W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0). This will be a significant accomplishment as millions of web pages will need to be changed and evaluated.

Problems Meeting Basic Compliance

Doing a simple survey of the Government of Ontario web pages (those with the extension gov.gc.ca) that fall under the Act, Google lists over 2 million pages. Of the top 10 sites listed here I did a quick accessibility snapshot using the Worldspace tool provided by Deque, none of the pages sampled met level A levels.

Examples of errors of these sites included were:

missing text alternatives for images and multimedia files
pages do not appear and operate in predictable ways
insufficient tools to help users find content and determine where they are
no mechanism to bypass navigation links is absent
content not readable and understandable
unclear purpose for links
HTML ID attribute value not unique
use of non-empty alt tags as place holders
all functionality available not available for a keyboard only user
no summary for layout tables
page does not have enough headings marked up
primary language of document not set
text entry field does not have an explicit HTML label
information conveyed by color alone
use of deprecated HTML elements

Organizations have to ensure that all new content meets these guidelines. Existing content will have to be provided in an accessible format when requested. By 2013 all existing websites will need to be to be compliant. There will also be fines if sites aren't perceivable, operable, understandable & sufficiently robust to meet these minimum standards (up to $100,000 fine per day).

Learning From the Feds

It's interesting to note that the Government of Canada implemented a standard for the Common Look & Feel (CLF) 2.0 which has a large accessibility component last year. Although many see the CLF as a branding exercise, millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on upgrading federal sites to the latest version.

Websites will always need to be upgraded, but so many government pages are still using static pages and so changes like this often need to be applied to each page. This isn't a big deal if you've just got a few pages to update every now and again, but with over 2 million pages it can be very expensive to keep up with ever improving standards.

A Cost Effective Solution

OpenConcept has been actively pursuing enhanced accessibility within Drupal because we are confident that this is a platform that can meet the needs of many organizations like those faced with this accessibility deadline. We know how to make an organizations website be interactive, usable, standards compliant and accessible. If your organization needs to comply with the AODA we would like to talk with you about migrating your content over to a Content Management System so that your site can be:

systematically evaluated for compliance
new content can be properly filtered before it is published
upgrades to standards can be applied when they are introduced
new interactive elements also meet the requirements

Meeting this legislation's requirement's is manageable, but only if it is dealt with properly. For more information on the Act see the Ministry of Community and Social Services and Access Ontario.

Promoting Open Source Procurement in Government

mgifford — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:52:29 -0400

The following article was prepared by OpenConcept for Summit Magazine, Canada's magazine for public service procurement. The full article is available within the PDF copy of the magazine.

After publication I was sent this PDF about open source procurement in the Netherlands that was worth sharing.

How Can Government Responsibly Procure Free Software?

Free software is “free” in two senses: it is distributed free of charge, and can be freely used and shared because it is unencumbered by onerous and restrictive licenses. This software model has been refined over the past twenty-five years, and its use has become mainstream.

In 2008, leading IT industry analyst Gartner Research announced that “Eighty-five percent of companies are already using open source software, with most of the remaining 15 percent expecting to do so within the next year.” Amazon lists 90 thousand books when searching for “open source”, and there are many more publications available electronically^.

In this age of the Internet and mature, enterprise-ready, open-source projects, commercial off-the-shelf software is an outdated concept. There is no longer a need for either the boxed software or the shelf it sat on. This article offers an introduction to this model of software development and distribution, and offers procurement professionals guidelines for approaching and understanding free and open-source tools.

What is Free / Open-Source Software?

Free software is distinguished by its licensing and by its transparency: it can be freely distributed and modified because its source code is made available. In contrast to the opaque workings of proprietary software, free software is developed in public, and is freely available for inspection, evaluation, and modification.

There are subtle licensing and philosophical differences between “free software” as defined and promoted by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the broad world of “open source” software. Our focus will be on Free Open Source Software (FOSS), but most of the points will also be relevant to Open Source Software (OSS) as well.

The “free” aspect of FOSS has been seen as problematic, inasmuch as things that are free are often seen as being without value. However there are many assessments of the value of FOSS products which clearly show that this is not the case. According to Ohloh.net, for example, the OpenOffice.org office suite would cost almost USD $150 million to develop from scratch, but it can downloaded for free, and offers a near drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office. In addition, it can then be distributed, modified, and improved just like other FOSS software.

Given that the current economic challenges mean everyone is trying to do more with less, paying for a license is often an unnecessary expense. And proprietary, closed-source software has far more costs than most government agencies realize. When you hire consultants to deploy and manage closed source products, there is no added value or opportunity to participate in a community of innovation. Investment in FOSS projects, on the other hand, benefits the entire sphere of FOSS users and developers. Open source tools free you from dependency on the sustainability, competence, and good will of third-party software vendors because there is a community of technical expertise that can be mobilized, commercially or not, to troubleshoot and improve FOSS systems.

Open source software reduces up-front implementation costs by eliminating license fees, but more importantly it can help protect against single-vendor lock-in. Vendor lock-in is a problem because companies it increases the cost for the deliverables. Lock-in is also a problem in terms of future-proofing your data or applications: if a company is bought out, goes out of business, or simply discontinues a product line, you may not be able to get support for your software. Software producers benefit by lock-in because they have an effective monopoly on their customers; this means they have little or no incentive to make better products, or to make their products interact well with other tools.

On a technical level, FOSS tools benefit from open, distributed. community-driven development. Many FOSS projects enjoy the attention of hundreds or thousands of developers, and tens or hundreds of thousands of engaged users. Such projects have demonstrated very rapid cycles of continuous quality improvement. Moreover, they are directly and actively responsive to the needs of their users. Many organizations have chosen to implement mature open source projects because they allow for the fast delivery of a well -tested product. In developing the Canadian Museum for Human Rightswebsite within just six weeks, for instance, Mark Stephenson of RealDecoy said, “the Drupal framework really saved us a lot of time.”

Despite its strong technical reputation and very widespread use, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about free software. Many of the concerns are unfounded, and based on limited knowledge of the FOSS community. For instance, the following are all true of FOSS software:

there is a great deal of commercial support available;
you have a wide choice of vendors (unlike many proprietary applications);
it is almost always more secure than closed-source code and on par or better than proprietary software, because the user/developer community is constantly evaluating and improving it;
industry has built and extended FOSS applications for real world enterprise environments;
active communities allow users to learn from each other and encourage innovation

Government and FOSS: Shared Values

Free software is presently being used by most if not all government departments. There is no central listing of software used by the Government of Canada. A short survey conducted by OpenConcept revealed that openconcept.ca/blog/mgifford/canadian_government_uses_plenty_of_open_source_software. FOSS is already being used extensively from the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) to the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

In many ways FOSS software is a natural match for government. Both software projects and government departments are mission-based and depend on finding a cost-effective manner to deliver services. Government financing comes largely through its citizens and anything that is produced is ultimately there to benefit the community. Likewise software projects are responsible to their community of users.

Jeff Braybrook, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Canada, spoke in February about the Treasury Board's adoption of MediaWiki for GCPedia. In his summary government and FOSS communities are natural allies as they share common values. Both communities: i) encourage participation, and having a platform to perform, to contribute and to interact with others; ii) promote co-operation and collaboration which is critical for any successful federal government or open source project; and iii) depend upon and are improved by agreed upon standards that allow for innovation./p>

To be innovative you need to encourage creativity, collaboration and provide inspiration for those working on common problems. Innovation is largely about combining old tools in new and creative ways. FOSS allows you to do this by not limiting how one can learn from and extend the tool and by encouraging the technology to be shared with others. Governmental use of FOSS tools thus provides a ready opportunity to both fulfil internal technical requirements while at the same time fostering and disseminating innovation.

FOSS Procurement Internationally

Earlier this year the UK, the IT in the Government initiative of the Cabinet Office put forward a very progressive procurement position calling for more use of open source, open standards and re-use within government. They were looking for solutions that provided the best value for money and also encouraged share and re-use of what the taxpayer has already purchased. The initiative was designed to encourage innovation and this precedent will not only benefit governments within the UK, but also around the world.

In the USA, the Department of Defense is a big advocate of this software model. Recently they launched Forge.mil which is hosting the military's open source projects. In their study they determined that using open source projects increases flexibility, produces greater interoperability, and reduces IT costs. The National Defense Authorization Act “has explicitly articulated a preference for open source software.”

There is a strong effort to even further entrench open source within the USA government. Especially since the election of Barack Obama. Large open source companies are banding together to lobby for change. Critical websites like Recovery.gov have been built using the Drupal CMS, and others are coming online using other open source tools.

FOSS Procurement in Canada

It is a misconception that FOSS isn't being used in the public sector in Canada. The Treasury Board's Federated Architecture Program has quite a wealth of information on OSS. Though it was largely written in 2003-2005 and so needs to be updated, it is nonetheless an example of a central department pursuing a path for OSS procurement within the Government of Canada. Industry Canada maintains an OSS Solutions and Support Providers page, and Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC) has created a Software Acquisition Reference Centre (SARC) that has a section for OSS. Neither of these is an endorsement of the companies listed, but reflects a general need for government departments to know where to consider their options.

PWGSC put forward an Request for Information (RFI) earlier this year in an attempt to get clarity on how the federal government should approach this issue. There should be a good summary from all of the input that was submitted, however the question was much too general. The RFI was for “Not for Charge Software” which included both OSS & FOSS licenses but also careware, trialware, shareware and adware. This very broad set of licenses has very little in common other than that there is no upfront financial cost. It should be stressed that openness and collaboration are distinctively characteristic of OSS and FOSS projects.

OSS Procurement

There are strong precedents for the use of FOSS, clear indications of value for total cost of ownership, and plenty of evidence that OSS can deliver enterprise-class results. But how does a procurement officer evaluate software in this new paradigm? In many cases the procurement officer may not have a software background so will not be able to technically compare two similar solutions. Having a richer understanding of the software industry will help, but there are a number of steps that can be taken to improve best practices. The following is an incomplete list of items to consider:

Evaluate the size of the community of users & developers and look at relevant trends of comparable software (with so many options available, make sure you have a critical mass). Google allows you to do a simple comparison with the trends search.
Check that there are users within your sector (it's worth checking if there are any communities of government sites). Drupal's founder Dries' blog has a focus for government and there's also two Drupal Groups available (for municipalites and national/provincial departments)
In evaluating software ensure that you are aware of the niche areas that the software is written for (MediaWiki is a great wiki platform if you want to emulate Wikipedia)
Most popular OSS projects are transparent about their processes for code review and also security evaluations. It's good to know what the release schedule is and also that there is an upgrade path available for users. All software needs to get upgraded at some point, so best to have a plan.
Is there a strong user community that is contributing back to the projects (either in bug reports, feature enhancements or even providing use cases?). Are there regular conferences, or even local meet-ups.
Are there a number of companies who work with the software who you can engage if required? Local companies and large multi-nationals are all using OSS, so it is important to consider where you want your money to go.
Is there a clear software license under which you know what obligations there are for your work? If work is all developed under the same license it will make it easier if questions around intellectual property issues do arise. Any software downloaded directly from Drupal.org is under the GPL free software license.
Particularly in Canada it is useful to assess if there is language support in both official languages. With most software projects, the developer documentation is usually written in English, however it is critical that the user/admin components can be available in French as well.
Software maturity is important for consideration. It is easy to start a software project, but much harder to sustain it and build a strong user base around it.
Documentation is important issue to evaluate with any software. Both inline and user documentation should be considered (With any reasonably large OSS project you'll find that there are books are available)
How user friendly is the product and how much training is required?
Is there a clear definition of what needs the software is expected to fulfill? How well does the software being evaluate meet these requirements? The Commons Group has developed a software needs worksheet to help.

Conclusions

The software procurement landscape has become more complicated. It is critical that public sector managers be able to evaluate the richer set of options that are now available. Resources are available to help educate and guide staff in making informed decisions about the pros and cons associated with different choices. There are also a number of frameworks, like the one defined by the Commons Group above, which can be used to plot the needs of the organization to learn about how to make better use of software within your organization. Requirements gathering takes time and money to do properly, but it is much better than once again purchasing something that doesn't meet the needs of users and that is incapable of being modified to do so.

Open source solutions offer robust performance and technical excellence, but perhaps more importantly they offer independence and flexibility. And importantly for the public sector, money spent implementing FOSS projects is an investment in the common good because improvements and testing for one can be contributed to improve these tools for all.

Ottawa Showcase of Drupal in Government

mgifford — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:39:41 -0400

It was the first sunny day we've had in a week, a perfect day to spend on a patio after work drinking a pint. However 35 people made their way to The Code Factory to attend the Drupal in Government Showcase. This was the largest Drupal event ever held in Ottawa and it clearly demonstrated that there is interest in this Content Management System.

Having organized the event we wanted to highlight the CLF 2.0 theme that are providing to the community as well as the extensive work that we have done on introducing accessibility enhancements to Drupal.

We had three interesting case studies presented. Mark Stephenson of RealDecoy, presented on their work with the Canadian Human Rights Museum. Steve Etlinger of Wirespeak presented two case studies of their experience developing Drupal sites for government clients.

The three remaining speakers touched on range of related issues. Jason Prini talked briefly about digitalOttawa's Common Look & Feel site. Andrew Ross from Ingres & FOSSLC talked briefly about their work to bring Drupal to work with the Ingres database and the FOSSLC's implementation of Drupal. The User Advocate Group's Michael Baynger gave a short talk about usability as it pertains to Drupal.

People attended from a number of goverment departments including Canadian Transportation Agency, Justice Canada, National Search and Rescue Secretariat, Agriculture Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Treasury Board, National Capital Commission, Canadian Border Security Agency, Environment Canada, City of Ottawa.

The majority were not Drupal users, but were interested in powerful, flexible & multi-lingual CMS and wanted to learn more. Having a range of developers speaking to Drupal's strengths and weaknesses was useful as this was clearly not a sales pitch by a marketing department. Having competing organizations present together shows clearly the strength of having a collaborative development community.

Accessibility was one of the central points of the discussion around this session. The Government of Canada's CLF 2.0 guidelines include the Priority 1 and Priority 2 checkpoints of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG). The universal accessibility guidelines are common to a lot of government agencies who have a mandate to communicate with the public.

Since the theme layer is distinct from the core applicaiton, many of the accessibility challenges that are outstanding can be resolved with an improved Drupal CLF theme. Most of the work that OpenConcept has been doing on accessibility issues has been focused on Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (ATAG) and improvents to form management.

There was interest in having another meeting in the fall to continue the discussions that were started here. We may look at creating an open software stack and describing how to build a scalable, secure web solution with Drupal. Could see inviting Redhat, Ingres, & Alfresco to present on solutions bringing open source web applications to government.

Federal Government Web-sites that Suck Less, but Are they Accessible?

Everett — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 05:56:39 -0400

On July 27, 2009, Laura Wesley wrote a very good article on Why government websites (still) suck. In her article, Laura explains a number of the practical and systemic causes for the slow pace of improvements to government sites. Laura also provides a list of six federal government sites, expanded to seven in the comments to her article, whose developers and designers she commends for the work they have done.

Wondering how accessible the sites that Laura commends are, I performed a very preliminary accessibility audit, from the perspective of a blind screen-reader user on two of the sites, and included one site of my own. The three sites are Health Canada, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and Copyright Consultations (the site I chose).

It is important to note that the following web-site evaluations are by no means exhaustive, and were not performed against any particular accessibility guideline. The following comments are reflective of my own user experience of the sites using the Firefox 3.5.2 web-browser and the JAWS 10.0.1154 screen-reader.

Health Canada

There were three major accessibility concerns that I noticed on the Health Canada web-site. These concerns, in no particular order, were the use of headings, the positioning of the text size adjustment controls, and the use of a rotating feature item.

Headings: the main page of the Health Canada site uses two level 1 and 6 level 2 headings. I won't critique the use of multiple level 1 headings, although others may. I will say that I did not find that it was easy to navigate to each navigational section of the page, for example the rotating feature item, by heading alone, and that the wording used for some headings did not give a clear description of the information to follow. For example, the heading "Current Subject" is followed by links like "About...", "Consumer Product Safety" and "Drugs & Health Products", to me none of these links are representative of the "Current Subject".

Text size adjustment: Being a completely blind user I rarely notice text size adjustment controls, they serve no purpose for me. However, I did happen to notice the controls on the Health Canada site, and noticed that they appear at the bottom of the page. Why is it important that these controls not be placed at the bottom of the page? Because there are some keyboard only users who would find it very difficult to try to navigate to the controls as they would have to tab through all of the other page content to reach the controls.

Rotating feature item: Just prior to the "Latest Headlines" heading is a strange combination of links and graphics, structured as a list. When I first approached this collection of six items I really had little idea what I was dealing with, and I've been at this a long time. The first three items were links with the text "1", "2", and "3", not particularly descriptive of the purpose and role of the links. The next two items were two linked images titled "Pause" and "Play", at this point I figured a video or audio object was to follow. The sixth item was a link with the text "Cell Phone Safety", no other information about cell phones appeared on this page, so if I missed this link the information wouldn't have been available to me. Without getting into to much detail of what I would have done differently, it suffices to say that providing more descriptive link text and a description of the purpose and role of this complex widget would have been helpful.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Citizenship and Immigration Canada web-site had the same three types of problems as Health Canada's web-site. However, I would say that Citizenship and Immigration did make a better use of headings.

Headings: The main page of the Citizenship and Immigration site uses 21 headings in total, this does seem like a little bit of overkill in the beginning, however it does nicely provide quick access to each grouping of navigational links. While navigating through the page, I also felt that each heading was a reasonably accurate description of the category of links to follow. Citizenship and Immigration does use 3 level 1 headings on their homepage., which does seem like an over usage of a heading whose purpose is to mark the beginning of a document, luckily at least one of these headings is actually used to mark the "Welcome to Citizenship and Immigration Canada" section of the page.

Copyright Consultations

The Copyright Consultations web-site did not appear to have text size adjustment controls, or a rotating feature item, but did exhibit a problem with headings, and quite a bit of repeating link text.

Headings: The main page of the Copyright Consultations site uses 13 headings, 2 at level 1 and 11 at level 2. As with the Citizenship and Immigration site, the headings seem to be reasonably descriptive of the grouping of links to follow. However, what I would have thought to be the main section of the page content "Welcome to the Copyright Consultation Website!", was not marked as a heading, and after reading through the rest of the document I would have likely not noticed this content other than that I was being thorough enough to write this evaluation.

Repeated link text: Most of the link text on the Copyright Consultations site is reasonably descriptive of the purpose of the link. However, the link text "Read and comment" appears on the page 15 times. For screen-reader users, it is important to ensure that link text provides an accurate description of the purpose of a link. The reasons for this are that many screen-reader users first familiarize themselves with a site by reading through a list of the links on the site, and they do not benefit from the context provided through visual grouping of different elements on the page.

Collaboration

Noticing some recurring accessibility problems in some, but not all, government sites, I wonder how much collaboration there is between developers in different departments. Ensuring a site's accessibility is a challenge, but one which is more easily accomplished in a collaborative work environment. For anyone who has not, I would encourage you to read my earlier article Common Look and Feel 2.0 and Drupal Collaboration, where I discuss a few of the benefits of collaboration. In short, why try to reinvent the accessibility wheel, when colleagues in other departments, or perhaps around the world, have already found the solution you're looking for?

Conclusion

None of the three federal government sites that I visited were amazingly accessible, nor were they amazingly inaccessible. The sites could have sucked less, but they certainly could have sucked more. Other than the general concept of collaboration, I would say that the developers of these sites should work on three major concepts. 1. The proper use of headings, to make their sites easier to navigate and understand. 2. Properly placing accessibility controls closer to the top of the page, to reduce the burden of finding and navigating to the controls. 3. Providing more descriptive link text, headings and instructions for complex user interface widgets.

Open Data in Government

mgifford — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:51:04 -0400

I've been thinking a lot recently about the accessibility of information that the government collects sometimes even distributes. We've blogged about problems getting information about postal code to riding data in the past. We ended up purchasing the data, but each time we do it is so inefficient it seems like it must cost the government more to sell it to me than give it away. Fortunately, there's been a lot of movement in this area around the world and there are a lot of good things to be inspired by.

In the USA today the Obama administration launched Data.gov which aims to "increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government." Now, government datasets seem pretty boring on the outset, but if you are trying to understand a problem it could be just the information you need. They are offering data in XML, CVS, Text, KML & map data. No restrictions (that I could see) on how I use the data. They've even got a rating system, and a call for other suggestions. This is a great step forward.

It's being propelled by the great folks at Sunlight Labs who along with Google & O'Reilly are sponsoring Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge. What better way to make government more accountable to it's citizens than to ensure transparency by opening up data for public scrutiny. The challenge is also going to inspire a bunch of new open source software to be developed and released to help others make good use of this data too. A lot of software is going to be developed for under $20K in prize money.

Even without new software being developed, there is so much that you can to make data more meaningful by with existing visualization tools like IBM's Many Eyes. There are also a great many open source tools to help with this too ranging from the SIMILE Widgets to OpenGeo mapping tools. We're looking forward to doing more mapping with mapping with Drupal's GMap or OpenLayers modules.

A bit closer to home I was impressed to hear about the results from Change Camp Ottawa. I wasn't able to attend this unfortunately, but was very happy to hear about the energy & ideas that went into this unconference. One of the sessions was about a new initiative, StimulusWatch. to watch government stimulous package spending. We've begun giving them a bit of support to help them move this project along. Other groups like CivicAccess & VisibleGovernment are also advocating for better access to this data.

I was encouraged also be getting a RFP today from a Canadian government agency that wanted to have a site that could produce RDFa. This has been a big push in the Drupal community since Dries Keynote address at the Boston Drupalcon in March 2008. So much of the time it seems that government IT is behind the leading edge, but perhaps times are changing.

Jeni Tennison has an interesting blog and in her article "Your Website is Your API: Quick Wins for Government Data", she makes a good case and approach for developing more accessible frameworks for government data through existing technology. Her approach is to identify the data that you control, represent that data in a way that people can use expose the data to the wider world. Her challenge is to do it now rather than waiting till you've got a the resources to do it "right". With a thoughtful approach information can be exposed so that it is useful for those outside your department.

Now I was thinking about this and where I could get open data from the government and use it to track something that concerns most Canadians. Knowing that the Weather Office of Environment Canada is an active supporter of open source, and that there is nothing that people like to complain about in Canada more than the weather, I thought this was a great start. I decided that I would run an evaluation of the weather reports by parsing the RSS feeds that are produced for Ottawa's Weather Conditions.

It's true, it's hardly something as interesting as tracking the amount of $$ that the Canadian government is spending to support women's groups in Afghanistan and being able to plot it against the number of times that our politicians have used the plight of women to explain why we have put our troops there. But we don't have ready access to that data to be able to do that type of analysis.

The good news is that the weather office is using a standardized format and that I can use common parsing tools to extract much of the data out of their feeds. The bad news is that the prototype that I developed (which is still very rough), indicates just how unreliable the forecasts are.

I will do a bit more work on this over the weeks to come to see if I can't flesh out this tool to give a more accourate reporting on the forecast. I'll also be extending it to other cities, and especially extending it to Whistler where I just found out that Environment Canada has placed a million dollar Doppler system for weather prediciton in the 2010 Games. Crazy the things we've got money for and those we don't.

Presentations on Drupal, Accessibility, Wiki's & Open Source in Government

mgifford — Tue, 19 May 2009 09:34:57 -0400

Last week was rather busy week for presentations involving Drupal. Most of them were associated with FOSSLC Summer Camp 2009, which fortunately were being taped by the organizers. The only non-FOSSLC event was participating in a panel discussion organized by the Translation Bureau of Canada.

Drupal Install Workshop

The week's presentations began with Steve McCullough & I leading a Drupal installation workshop. This went quite well for most of the participants because we were starting with a MAMP or WAMP install of the environment and then adding Drupal on top of that. Ran into a couple odd problems by going through this process. One guy had previously set up one or two other web servers and so had some conflicts to work out in his Vista laptop.

This was a very interesting process in terms of understanding usability in the wild. I'd highly recommend that we organize a few Drupal 7 installation workshops before the final release is made. We ran into a bit of a problem where someone had cookie's disabled and was getting a bunch of MySQL errors in the installation process. I haven't had the time to try to replicate this however.

Wiki's & Translation in Government

Following this presentation I went immediately to participate in the Symposium 2009 Round-table for the Federal Terminology Council of the Translation Bureau of Public Works. Of the panelists I was the least familiar with wiki implementations, and in particular the challenges that they bring to a bilingual environment. Alain Desilets has been developing software at NRC to assist with wiki translation. The other panelist was Jeff Braybrook, the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Canada. Jeff has been spearheading the implementation of GCPEDIA, an implementation of the open source MediaWiki application.

I didn't stay all this closely to these notes, but I wrote them up for the interpreters would have something to prepare them. I added an additional section about the integrating multiple online terminology databases to be able to provide translators with a range of possible options depending on the context.

The fundamental technical elements that make up a wiki are probably best described by these 4 elements:

Open editing and flat permissions
Keeping revisions, viewing diffs, & restoring them
Very simple wikitext markup, usually no WYSIWYG
Informal page structure based on title and text

There are at least three major approaches to consider and lots of open source tools to work with. Tiki Wiki & MediaWiki have both been featured here in this symposium, both these can be extended using various modules that have been developed by the community or you can develop ones yourself. There are also content management platforms like Drupal which are highly customizable and can provide a wiki environment. Furthermore, you can also create a hybrid system that allows your users to work with an integrated wiki & content management applications.

Choosing which of these three is the right fit for your organization may take some trial & error, but they are all using open source tools so the initial investment costs are low. MediaWiki is the wiki that most people are familiar with because of Wikipedia and so is the easiest to implement. TikiWiki can import from MediaWiki, so there is a nice upgrade path for the wiki approach.

Drupal would be ideal if you want to have more control over the structure of the content that users are submitting, the way that it is displayed, and the permission systems needed for your team. It has a nice file management system, faceted taxonomy, and a good system for managing multi-lingual objects. You can also swap out the wikitext with a range of options including WYSIWYG editors, Markdown or Textile.The flexible content type infrastructure also gives administrators the ability to modify the structure of the data after it has been implemented. However although it can use the same basic markup as MediaWiki, it isn't easy to provide support for the more advanced markup.

The technology is the medium for communications, so knowing what you need to communicate, how it will integrate with existing procedures is critical. Wiki culture is very participatory and you may want this for some communications functions and not others. Using two different web applications that have a common login & common design may help to re-enforce the tone of communication. The intellectual & cultural impacts of wiki's are more critical than the technical one.

There are also inevitably questions about how a wiki can be smoothly integrated with any existing file sharing tools, discussion forums and other mechanisms that are already in place within an organization. In some cases the solutions above should be considered to replace existing Intranets.

Open Source & Government

My next presentation was on getting open source in government for the FOSSLC Summer Camp. I was definitely speaking to the choir, but was encouraged to see representation from a number of government departments including Elections Canada. Open source software is widely used in government infrastructure, however it is so often done without official acknowledgment. This talk should be available, but I didn't prepare a slide presentation so it needed to be reformatted.

Accessibility & Drupal

My final presentation of the week was looking at accessibility in Drupal 7. I've written extensively on this in the Drupal Community and also this blog, but it's always good to have information presented in different ways. I've attached the OpenOffice presentation, the PDF version & this integrated presentation using Flash 10. (Note: if you don't hear anything, you may need to upgrade your Flash player) I shrunk down the embedded video, but it unfortunately cuts off some of the slide-show, the original Flash version is better.

NOTE: I realized after I posted this blog that I hadn't saved the PDF file with tags enabled. Since this was a presentation about accessibility I thought I would re-upload it with the tags. Now I don't know how much this will add to a presentation, but was impressed by this article on OpenOffice's accessibility functionality I'll leave them both online in case someone wants to compare.

Your browser does not support inline frames or is currently configured not to display inline frames.

Open Source Adoption Inevitable for Canada's Government?

mgifford — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:09:19 -0400

This is a reprint of the article originally published in OSBR's May Issue under the title The Feds are Ready for a Change

"OSS is indeed the start of a fundamental change in the software infrastructure marketplace, but it is not a hype bubble that will burst and [the] UK government must take cognizance of that fact." Douglas Alexander

Canada is at the tipping point for acceptance of open source. Open source software (OSS) and culture has reached a critical mass in the business world and it is also being actively deployed within the Canadian government. While open source has contributed outstanding code, its impacts are even more profound, raising core values of participation, co-operation and standardization. However, like many large institutions, there has been reluctance by the Canadian federal government to modernize its official position regarding this approach to software development. There is still considerable investment in existing procurement practice and thousands of jobs and billions of dollars are being invested in old information technology (IT) solutions.

Roger Burkhardt from Ingres summed it up well in a recent presentation to the US Embassy in Ottawa that was well attended by a wide range of Canadian federal departments. He described a perfect storm in which:

OSS has clearly matured and is ready for the enterprise
the economy requires departments to reduce costs quickly
demands for IT innovation are growing faster than ever

According to Burkhardt, the best practice of modern IT development now involves commercially supported OSS. This practice frees up government staff and empowers them to take full control of their software applications.

This article discusses the global momentum in federal government departments to support open source as well as some of the problems with the federal government's procurement process. However, despite the problems and relatively slow adoption of open source technology, there is movement for adoption. Federal government policies may be lagging behind other G7 governments, but OSS is being implemented across the civil service. There are also many people within government, at all levels, who understand the advantages of using open source.

Global Governments

In Canada, we tend to compare ourselves with the United States. The election of Barack Obama, who has been called the open source president, poses a challenge to our government. High profile sites like recovery.org, built using open source Drupal, and the Government of Canada's counterpart actionplan.gc.ca, built with .NET, illustrate a difference in government transparency and accessibility. Obama uses the Web as an interactive medium to communicate effectively with his citizens and our government uses it as an electronic pamphlet.

It is worth noting that this move toward open source started before Obama was elected. The intelligence and diplomatic community have been using MediaWiki extensively. The CIA has been using Plone since 2007. The US Department of Defence has been has been promoting open source through Forge.mil. Red Hat also has a long relationship of working closely with US federal government agencies to produce SELinux, a very secure version of GNU/Linux.

In February 2009, the UK changed its official open source policy. The Cabinet Office set a new mandate to consider open source procurement with all transactions. These policies stipulate that "open source and proprietary products are [to be] considered equally and systematically", and note that "learning from others is a key aspect of the CIO Council's operating principles". The guidelines also state that "general purpose software developed by or for government will be released on an open source basis".

If the UK government is officially engaging with the open source community, and "actively encourag[ing] projects", how can the Government of Canada not benefit from following the same path? All levels of government could significantly benefit from shared security audits, usability enhancements, scalability testing, and code enhancements.

Leadership by the Canadian government would allow provinces and municipalities to adopt open source technologies to help them save money and have more customized tools. The UK provides an example through their Open Source Academy which promotes open source to "local authorities through knowledge sharing and practical advice".

There are many more examples from Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Switzerland, Pakistan, Holland, and the other G7 countries. The EU has established an Open Source Observatory and Repository (See the OSBR article on European adoption) for European public administrations and has produced a GPL 2.0 equivalent license in the European Union Public License (EUPL). The global community is moving much more quickly on open source adoption than Canada's federal government policy makers.

Canadian Procurement Difficulties

The existing Canadian federal procurement vehicles fail to support open source. The focus is still on product based software in which a department buys a license. Since the cost of open source is derived from services and not products, OSS is more difficult for procurement officers to manage.

The only government website that lists open source and proprietary software choices is Public Work's Software Procurement Acquisition Resource Catalogue. Unfortunately, this document is outdated and most government employees start looking for software either with Google or existing vendors.

Policies tend to favour large bids from large vendors rather than from smaller shops specializing in open source products. Most government procurement policy is "led by the need to offset blame. The bigger the company involved, the better". While IBM supports Drupal and other open source tools, the company will tend to make a larger profit by selling the government a more expensive system that ensures lock-in.

When small companies are approached by departments, they are asked if they have an existing standing offer, which most do not have the resources to set up. Most open source shops are small and medium sized businesses and do not have the resources to compete head to head with the opportunities that come up through systems like MERX, Canada's electronic tendering service.

Federal procurement officers are not encouraged to consider open source solutions. With a wide range of staff preaching fear, uncertainty and doubt, there are many procurement officers who shy away from open source even when it does have a considerably smaller bottom line. It is safer and easier for most project managers to renew or extend a license with an existing vendor, rather than consider a mature open source alternative.

Movements Within Government

Recently, the federal government has been looking at revising its policies on open source. In January 2009, Public Works posted a Request for Information (RFI) on no charge licensed software. OpenConcept was one of many organizations and individuals which responded. Unfortunately, the RFI questions were too general, diluting the value of the evaluation. The request included this definition: "No Charge Licensed Software means Licensed Software that is available at no charge for the Licensed Software and is typically made available as a free download from the Internet". This broad definition could be interpreted to include non-OSS software such as abandonware, adware, crippleware, demoware, and postcardware, all of which dilute the value of open source.

The 2004 federal government position paper, Open Source Software Position has yet to be updated. This paper is geared more to IT architects rather than procurement officers and the range of software addressed is significantly limited. However, the paper does establish a precedent for including open source in procurement decisions. Legal and administrative systems will always be the last to change, but this is no longer uncharted territory.

It is encouraging to note that there are a number of internal advocates for open source within the federal government. OpenConcept works with Drupal, a popular open source content management platform, and has been approached by IT staff in several departments who are looking for support with this application. There are many people working in government who know that open source solutions fit their needs in that it is cost effective, secure, and can be deployed quickly.

Already Engaged

OpenConcept has been providing services for federal government departments over many years. Over this time, we have seen considerable progress in the use and understanding of open source. Any government department that deals with the scientific community has been actively using open source for years. Environment Canada's Weather department, Natural Resources Canada, National Resource Council Canada, and the Canadian Space Agency have been leading the way as their researchers have needed to use powerful, cost effective tools. More conservative departments, like the Canadian Revenue Agency, are using open source internally, although less extensively.

While the implications of a procurement policy that mandates open source are being discussed, OSS is quietly being deployed throughout the government. In 2009, OpenConcept surveyed Government of Canada web servers to determine where open source was being used. Nearly half the sites surveyed were using some form of OSS. With Gartner estimating that private sector adoption of open source is now at 85% and growing quickly, it is clear that the policy makers in Canada are trailing technology implementers in understanding the benefits and maturity of OSS. According to Slashdot editor Timothy Lord, "tax-paid software should be seen as a uniquely extensible part of the commonwealth, because whenever the government supports open source software, even through mere use, it adds value to the same software for everyone else". By adopting open source tools like Apache, MediaWiki, Drupal, and Firefox, the government is supporting other Canadians who are also using these tools.

Values

Jeff Braybrook, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Canada, spoke in February about the Treasury Board's adoption of MediaWiki for GCPedia, the Government's internal proof of concept wiki for the exclusive use of government employees. He addressed the advantages and challenges to adopting open source in government. Government and open source communities are natural allies as they share common values. Both communities: i) encourage participation, and having a platform to perform, to contribute and to interact with others; ii) promote co-operation and collaboration which is critical for any successful federal government or open source project; and iii) depend upon and are improved by agreed upon standards that allow for innovation.

The adoption of OSS clearly ties into a sound economic policy to support small and medium businesses in Canada. Canada's Economic Action Plan has allocated 7.5 billion to support Canadian businesses and communities during the recession. Smart investments in open source technology produce jobs for Canadians while building a stronger information infrastructure for everyone. According to Red Hat's Javed Tapia, "the service-oriented model of open source has a positive fallout on the domestic economy through the generation of local employment, spurring of local investment and ensuring local technological upgradation". Using open source means that government funds go back into the pockets of citizens rather than add to a multi-national corporation's profit margins.

Conclusion

The hard work of many people inside and outside of the Canadian government to manifest a rational, economic and innovative technology practice is about to be realized. Despite obstacles, civil servants are implementing OSS solutions that meet real needs. It is prudent for government to invest in tools which can be re-used, shared and extended to maximize the impact of increasingly limited budgets. Open source provides a metaphor for a larger cultural shift in Canadian society which is pushing for greater transparency, accountability and involvement.

Adding Dublin Core Metadata to Drupal

mgifford — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:07:55 -0400

We've been doing a lot of work recently about the Common Look and Feel for the federal government here in Canada. One of the requirements of the CLF has been that documents are created with Dublin Core meta data to allow for it to be more machine readable. This is a great step, and it is nice to be working with an international standard like this. Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be any easy way to produce this meta data with existing modules.

Several people have started developing Dublin Core modules in the Drupal community, but none have finished it. The Meta tags module probably comes the closest as it is designed to produce meta tags for search engine optimization. Unfortunately extending the Meta tag output to allow for a much wider range values isn't presently allowed.

One of the best examples of code provided to allow for Dublin Core that I found was provided on the tech journalist David Fisco's blog. I wanted to have something wrapped into a function in the template.php file so took this and re-wrote it significantly for my needs.

The standard list of available terms within the Dublin Core is a lot larger than what I need for my purposes. I was just looking for a method to provide the basics. abstract, audience, created, creator, date, description, language, license, subject, title would be lots. Some of this can be pulled right from Drupal, I also provided opportunities for using leveraging the Mata tag module and using custom CCK fields as well.

<?php
function phptemplate_preprocess_page(&$vars) {
$current_language = $vars['language']->language;
$vars['dublin_core'] = simple_dublin_core($current_language, $vars['title'], $type, $format, $vars['node']);
}
function simple_dublin_core ($current_language, $title, $type, $format, $node) {
$creator = 'OpenConcept Consulting Inc.';
$publisher = 'OpenConcept Consulting Inc.';
$rights_holder = 'Content Creator';
// Set license & content
$license_notice = 'This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.';
$license_content = 'Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.';
// Start producing metadata
$dc_output .= "\n\n" . (!empty($title)) ? '<meta name="dc.title" content="' . $title . "\" />\n" : '';
// Pull values from CCK (if defined)
$cck_subject_field = $node->field_dublin_core_subjects[0]['value'];
$cck_description_field = (!empty($node->field_dublin_core_description[0]['value'])) ? $node->field_dublin_core_description[0]['value'] : $node->field_dublin_core_abstract[0]['value'];
$intended_audience = (!empty($node->field_intended_audience[0]['value'])) ? $node->field_intended_audience[0]['value'] : 'general public';
// Get subject/description through either nodeword module or cck definitions
if (function_exists('nodewords_get')) {
$metatags = nodewords_get('node', $node->nid);
foreach ($metatags as $tagname => $tagcontent) {
if ($tagname == 'keywords') {
$dc_output .= (!empty($tagcontent)) ? '<meta name="dc.subject" content="' . $tagcontent . "\" />\n" : '';
}
if ($tagname == 'description') {
$dc_output .= (!empty($tagcontent)) ? '<meta name="dc.description" content="' . $tagcontent . "\" />\n" : '';
}
}
} else {
// field_dublin_core_subjects: a semi-colon-delimited list of additional subjects you want included in your metadata
$dc_output .= (!empty($cck_subject_field)) ? '<meta name="dc.subject" content="' . str_replace(',', ';', $cck_subject_field) . "\" />\n" : '';
$dc_output .= (!empty($cck_description_field)) ? '<meta name="dc.description" content="' . $cck_description_field . "\" />\n" : '';
$dc_output .= (!empty($node->field_dublin_core_abstract[0]['value'])) ? '<meta name="dcterms.abstract" content="' . htmlspecialchars(ereg_replace("<[^>]*>", "", $node->field_dublin_core_abstract[0]['value'])) . "\" />\n" : '';
}
$dc_output .= (!empty($language)) ? '<meta name="dc.language" scheme="ISO639-2/T" content="' . $language . "\" />\n" : '';
$dc_output .= '<meta name="dc.identifier" scheme="DCTERMS.URI" content="http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] . "\" />\n";
$dc_output .= '<meta name="dc.relation.IsPartOf" scheme="DCTERMS.URI" content="http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . "\" />\n";
$dc_output .= '<meta name="dc.creator" content="' . $creator . "\" />\n";
$dc_output .= (!empty($publisher)) ? '<meta name="dc.publisher" content="' . $publisher . "\" />\n" : '';
$dc_output .= '<meta name="dcterms.license" content="' . $license_content . "\" />\n";
$dc_output .= '<meta name="dc.rights" content="' . $license_notice . "\" />\n";
$dc_output .= '<meta name="dc.rightsHolder" content="' . $rights_holder . "\" />\n";
// Date of Publication
$dc_output .= (!empty($node->created)) ? '<meta name="dcterms.issued" content="' . date('Y-m-d', $node->created) . "\" />\n" : '';
$dc_output .= (!empty($node->changed)) ? '<meta name="dcterms.modified" content="' . date('Y-m-d', $node->changed) . "\" />\n" : '';
// Could be extended to look at node types
$dc_output .= (!empty($type)) ? '<meta name="dc.type" scheme="W3CDTF" content="' . $type . "\" />\n" : "<meta name=\"dc.type\" content=\"text\" />\n";
$dc_output .= (!empty($format)) ? '<meta name="dc.format" scheme="W3CDTF" content="' . $format . "\" />\n" : "<meta name=\"dc.format\" content=\"text/html\" />\n";
$dc_output .= '<meta name="dc.audience" scheme="gcaudience" content="' . htmlspecialchars(ereg_replace("<[^>]*>", "", $intended_audience)) . "\" />\n";
return $dc_output;
}

Then this just needs to be placed in the header of the page.tpl.php file:

<?php print $dublin_core; ?>

Now there are problems with meta data as Cory Doctorow points out in his article "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia", the old phrase garbage in, garbage out still applies.

After writing this code I ran into this article for bringing Dublin Core into CCK's Computed Fields and do think there is some more space for collaboration here.

In talking with Matthew Smith about Dublin Core, it became clear that it would also be very logical to pull the description from the teaser and the subject from the taxonomy. Simply exposing the taxonomies in a consistent way would have so many usability advantages.

GhostNet & Creating a Culture of User Security

mgifford — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:33:43 -0400

Quick update, OpenOffice now ships with macro security set for 'High' so that "Only signed macros from trusted sources are allowed to run. Unsigned macros are disabled". By going to Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org -> Security -> Macro Security You can also set the security level to 'Very High' so that "Only Macros from trusted file locations are allowed to run. All other macros, regardless whether signed or not, are disabled." So if you are concerned with these articles, use OpenOffice.

Listening to CBC's Search Engine Podcast I was reminded again of how much our perceptions of security have changed and how much organizations and activists need to do to be mindful of the people they are working to support. For those folks who missed the news on this item, the office of the Dalai Lama brought in the Munk Centre for International Studies' Citizen Lab to investigate some issues they were having with their computers. Turns out that an Microsoft Word document containing a Trojan horse that allowed the attacker to list and access any documents available to their computer (including on their networks), any keystrokes made on that computer and even allowed the attacker to turn on the victim's webcam and see/hear their conversations. This large-scale cyber spying operation was given the name GhostNet.

Now this has been possible for a long time, in fact the code for the Trojan horse that was used can be downloaded from the Internet and manipulated by hackers for all kinds of purposes. What's new is that the folks from the Citizen Lab were able to backtrack and access the control server that was directing these hacks. They were also able to identify that the attackers seemed to have a political target as this Trojan horse was distributed through crafted email and attachment concerning Tibet. Now given that the control server was hosted in China, that the interface was written in Chinese and that China has a strong interest in monitoring activists concerned about their occupation of Tibet, it is most likely that Chinese intelligence is behind this. This is a concern, but not my main one.

Call for NGO Awareness

My main concern is that mission based organizations need to be aware that these threats are out there and take measures to address security issues more seriously. It's one thing to have a teenager hack your computer to gain access to your credit card number or force your computer to do a DOS attack against Yahoo. Heck, even organized crime writing software in order to go phishing and extract data from individuals computers is something where we can think of it as bad luck. It's a much different thing have a government begin spying on individuals and organizations who are outspoken against it using these tools. We are entering an age of Information Warfare, and this case is the biggest publicized example of it. There are technical examples of how these targeted attacks work both for Word docs and even HTML email.

Now, most of us don't have information on our computers that identifies the location of political dissidents who are targeted by hostile regimes. However, there are non-profits out there that do have confidential names and contact information for activists whose lives could be on the line in the name of promoting human rights, free speech, or democracy in different parts of the world. It is in the interests of many countries around the world, be it Iran, Burma or Zimbabwe, to track down as much information as they can about their opponents using whatever means necessary. I don't think that there is any country in the world that has binding legislation that prevents them from engaging in using these types of attacks to extract information about areas of political or economic interest. There are already examples of where cyber snooping have had real world impacts.

It's Not About Money

So, particularly in these times most non-profits can't afford to spend a lot of time & money on improving their staff's understanding and use of security. It takes time and money to secure computer systems, of the 1000+ infected computers that were identified, close to 30% were high-value targets such as foreign affairs offices, embassies, intergovernmental agencies, news organizations and NATO. What the attacker was able to gain from the millions of files that they would have had access to is hard to know, and probably those documents will be a source of information available for the attacker for years. However, one would expect that all of these government backed agencies would be aware of security issues, have staff to address them and be able to purchase software to protect their systems. The problem though isn't really with the technology, rather than the culture surrounding technology.

This attack infiltrated government computers in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan. It's ironic that France was one of the government's whose computers were affected - a security audit done by the French Ministry of Defense of office suites gave OpenOffice a much lower security rating than MicroSoft Office back in 2006 - yet if their computers were running OpenOffice they would not have been compromised in this attack. I am sure that most of these offices had some form of virus protection installed on their network and desktops. These anti-virus efforts are not 100% effective, I was quite surprised at how many infected files got through in this report, and these tests would have included up-to-date definitions. With the prevalence of USB keys and laptops it is that much harder to lock down systems and protect our computers from Malware.

The report of the GhostNet attack are available online.

The Macro Virus Problem

The default behavior for OpenOffice (and I think MS Word) is to asks before running any kind of macro, thus preventing the commands from executing automatically. Both are sticking with the need for macros as a core part of office optimization, which it might be, but most folks won't ever take advantage of this. It is because MS Office has the lion's share of the market office suite market that it is more vulnerable that OpenOffice. People using OpenOffice will not be exposed to MS Word macro attacks (which are the majority), just as GNU/Linux & Mac users gain some protection from not being both the biggest and easiest targets for attack. I am disappointed that there isn't a secured version of OpenOffice that provides additional security enhancement, but heck, this is open source and if there's enough interest it can and will be done.

The security stance from both OpenOffice and Microsoft is that users should never accept files from unknown sources. However, frankly this assumes that you can know who sent you the email, which you can't. In the case of the GhostNet attack that I've been discussing here, the email came from what looks like it could be a legitimate email - campaigns@freetibet.org - from the domain used it certainly looks like Free Tibet is a legitimate organization. Unfortunately, any techie can tell you how easy it is to send out an email address and have it appear to be coming from an email address like that, or for that matter from president@whitehouse.gov. Most email systems do not even verify that this email address even exists before accepting it. However, it is quite likely that this email exists and in-fact may have been a trusted address used by staff of this Tibet independence website. So simply having had prior communications with campaigns@freetibet.org isn't enough to know that the document that they are sending you does not contain a virus or Trojan.

The main problem is that people have gotten used to the idea of sending and receiving Word Documents like "Translation of Freedom Movement ID Book for Tibetans in Exile.doc" as a normal part of their daily business practice. Because it is simple and easy to just attach the file we are working on and pass it around via email, people do. People assume that everyone can just open up their .doc file and read it, and in many cases they can. Although OpenOffice is pretty good at reading MS Word documents, older versions of MS Word can only do so if you've taken the time to save it in an older format (Say Word '97). Office files also can contain historical revisions that you want to be able to access when you are editing a document, but that can be very damning if it is made available to whoever receives it. The culture of assuming that everyone can just open up the .doc file is largely responsible for ensuring that people aren't exporting final documents in a presentation format like PDF that everyone can read and that does not posses these risks.

A Simple Change

PDF is an open platform established by Adobe Systems, but that is available in every operating system and from suppliers other than Adobe. OpenOffice has some very nice tools that allow you to easily export to PDF's. I don't think that Microsoft has adopted this yet as it is in their business model to sell more of their products and 3rd party products like Adobe Acrobat (which does have some security vulnerabilities) and anti-virus tools. Making it easier for people to create PDF's will make it more likely that people will share them. Educating people about the risks associated with sending/receiving .doc files is something that needs to be ongoing. People working on issues of human rights and development in particular should be leading the way on this as lives depend on it there, more than anywhere (perhaps).

Making the switch to OpenOffice will provide some initial security protection, as will switching to Ubuntu or Apple, because there are still far less tools, examples, and infected systems than there are in a Microsoft Environment. Simply being part of a minority will help change the culture of users (who are ultimately responsible for either disabling the macro warning or so numbed to popup notices that they just approve them without understanding the potential risk, and then move on. OpenOffice is free, supported and will import most of your existing documents without difficulty. Hopefully we'll also be able to see a hardened version of OpenOffice or an extension that can be applied to require administrator approval before being able to trust a document with a macro included.

Panel Discussion on the Value of Open Source in Government

mgifford — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 16:35:02 -0400

I was fortunate to be invited to participate in a panel discussion organized by Andrew Ross of Ingress. The panel from left to right Roger Burkhardt (Ingres), Jean Bernatchez (Enterprise Stewardship and Internal Services Strategies, Chief Information Officer Branch, Treasury Board of Canada), Dave McIlhagga (DM Solutions), me & Donald Smith (Eclipse):

Business value of open source panel discussion from Andrew Ross on Vimeo.

I had a hard time focusing on what I was going to say to some of the questions that were presented to the panel, because of the responses from the other panelists. The perspectives from all of the panelists were very valuable. The accessibility of video/audio recording technology and the convenience of online delivery tools like Blip.tv, YouTube & Vimeo gives your events so much more impact.

The focus of the panel/questions was rather general, but this is Ottawa, so there was a lot of discussion about the involvement of government. Andrew used Google's new Moderator Application to help evaluate questions to present, and I think that worked quite well. It was the same tool used by Barack Obama when he took questions from citizens (mind you he had a lot more votes/questions).

The business folks did seem to agree that the Canadian government procurement policies seemed to favour proprietary tools & big corporations. There also seemed to be agreement of the value of promoting open source within government for many reasons (local economic growth, improved security, flexibility, standards based, etc.)

It was fascinating to hear from both the Eclipse Foundation & the Open Source Geospatial Foundation's approach to the role of foundations in getting buy-in from government. I do think that there are so many ways that government and business can contribute to the endorsement of tools that benefit the larger community.