Government

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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:

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. 

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.

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.