Adventures in Radio
A couple of weeks ago we had a call to the office from a BBC radio producer asking if the creators of Votegeek would like to be interviewed for the Radio 4 programme “Click On”. After thinking about this for a femptosecond or two the answer was “Yes!”. So on Friday I found myself sitting in reception of Broadcasting house in London watching lots of probably famous people that I didn’t recognise wandering in to work. After a little while I was called up to the studio (very nice anechoic chamber and separate room with mixing desks and blinking lights) and we got on with the interview. You can Listen to the show or read the transcript below.
Simon Cox:
Now the parties policies on technology probably aren’t not going to influence who gets your vote in the election. While the digital economy bill now may become law, the debate accompanying it’s rather speedy passage through parliament revealed just how little many politicians know about technology. With the economy dominating the campaign how can you find out what your local candidates think, or even know about technology. Well the answer is votegeek, the brainchild of Alan Bell, and he is with me in the studio. Alan, what are you hoping to achieve then through your site?
Alan Bell:
Well we have got a dual aim really, one half of it is to get the geeky type personality more interested in politics, and get people to understand that politics matters to them. The second aim is to get the candidates aware that we exist and that we are voters too.
SC:
What are the issues that people are wanting to focus on with candidates, presumably it is not just about broadband speed?
AB:
No, it is a wide range of issues, we are not focussing on a single issue, but we are focussing on a single topic. So there are issues such as the use of Free Software in the public sector. Public procurement policy, digital freedom, privacy, and censorship are definitely topic areas of interest.
SC:
In terms of the candidates you have been contacting what kind of reaction have you been getting from them?
AB:
A very positive reaction from some of them, and a lack of response from others! We have had responses from all the major parties, and a number of the minor parties. I was particularly pleased with a comment from the Official Monster Raving Loony Party for instance!
SC:
Are they surprised when you contact them?
AB:
The Official Monster Raving Loony Party gentleman was yes! But I would say it is not just me and my group of helpers that are contacting people, we are asking people out there to go and find their constituency on the site, look at the candidates that are available for them to vote for, and then contact their candidates. So the message to the candidates is coming from one of their constituents. There is then a comment area where people can record emails and letters they have sent to their candidates and also responses they have received back.
SC:
So it is trying to build up a profile is it on their views on particular technology issues?
AB:
Yes, it is allowing people to share information about their candidates views.
SC:
Now Rupert, what do you think about this, I mean with the Digital Economy Bill the politicians didn’t really cover themselves in glory did they?
Rupert Goodwins:
Well following the Digital Economy Bill closely was quite an eye opener for me, because not only did it transpire that the politicians didn’t know what they were talking about, but they didn’t quite realise why it was being rushed through so quickly, and this is an important part of anyone who wants to be an active democrat because you can’t be good at democracy unless you are informed. Things like votegeek mean that we can get much more involved and force politicians to be more serious about their jobs and that is an excellent thing.
SC:
What about the way that technology is being used during the campaign, we are always hearing that this is the election where we are suddenly going to see technology really beginning to take off, have you been struck at all by way it is being used?
RG:
Well yes there was the big debate, well the first of the debates between the three candidates for Prime Minister and if you were online whilst watching that there were lots and lots and lots of people talking away on twitter, blogs and instant messaging. There was an awful lot of debate going on at the same time which never happened before. The most important thing about politics is to be involved and to be informed and technology is allowing that to happen in a new way for the first time.
SC:
Alan Bell, thanks a lot for that, and Rupert thanks to you too.
Vote Geek!
The UK is approaching the next General Election, the smart money is on it being May 6th, neatly falling between Oggcamp and UDS-M although it is just about possible that these two major events are not actually the driving reasons for a May 6th election. So who should you vote for? Who can you vote for? What do the candidates in your constituency think about issues important to the average geek? Good questions all of them, and to provide at least some of the answers we have set up VoteGeek.org.uk a website where you can find out who is standing in your constituency and with a bit of crowd sourcing (which is where you come in) we can find out what they think. The site launched today and I am very pleased to say we have already had a comment direct from a candidate who will be standing in Hackney South and Shoreditch.
To talk techie for a second, the site is basically a WordPress blog, but not used in the traditional way, all the 650 posts for the constituencies were pre-created and don’t really have a chronological order, we are using WordPress to handle the comments, it is easy to theme and we know it can handle a lot of load.
The theme started out as a blue fixed width layout, I adapted it to a fluid layout (I hate fixed width sites) and changed it away from blue because I didn’t want to have a colour that is strongly associated with any of the parties. I was pondering the new colour options and ended up picking our new favourite colour – Aubergine! The swirly thing was done with the flame filter in the Gimp.
Most of the data about the candidates comes from http://yournextmp.com if you spot any missing or incorrect information then click the candidate name to go to their page on the yournextmp.com site and correct it there. All the constituencies get refreshed by a little python script that pulls data from the json API provided by yournextmp.
So the site has two main objectives, firstly to get geeks like me more interested in politics and more aware that they can and should contact their representatives about things that matter, and cast an informed vote. Secondly it is to make the candidates (including the all important winning candidate) aware that there are people in their area who care about issues in the general Free and Open Source arena.
So what do we need you to do now?
Well firstly if you are in the UK please go to http://votegeek.org.uk and find your constituency. Take a look at your candidates and see what other people have written to them. Think about a question you would like to ask the people who might get your vote and then write them a letter. Leave a comment with your letter and the replies you get so other people in your area can see them too.
If you are of the tweeting/denting persuasion then please mention the site (and your comments on it) along with the #votegeek hashtag.
Update on UK Gov’s Institutional Profligacy
As you may recall, a couple of weeks ago I used Write to Them to contact my MP, Jeremy Hunt, regarding the comments of the new CIO of HMRC and how it seemed that saving money was not being encouraged by our civil servants. I discussed it in this blog post:
Phil Pavitt, recently-appointed CIO for HM Revenue and Customs, has revealed that attempts to cut government budget is positively discouraged. In a telling anecdote, he says “In my first few weeks of the job I was visited by leading members of the Cabinet Office. In that conversation with me they mentioned I am in the top purchasing club… That means you have tremendous influence on buying power, buying ideas and management and so on.”I said ‘If I reduce costs by 50 per cent what happens?’, ‘Well, you leave the club,’ I was told.”
A couple of days ago I got a follow up from Jeremy after he received a reply from the Rt. Hon Angela Smith MP, Minister of State at the Cabinet Office. He didn’t seem that impressed…
Dear Alan,
Further to my email of 16th February 2010, I have now received the attached response from the Rt Hon Angela Smith MP, Minister of State at the Cabinet Office.
Given the worrying content of your email, the Minister has responded with little more than a standard response about how they always try to obtain good value for money.
Sadly we will never know what was said amongst the Minister and her civil servants about your email. However, I think we can be confident that it bore no resemblance to the final response I received!
Whilst Ms Smith’s comments are not surprise, I am sorry to have to pass on such a disappointing reply. If there is anything further I can take up with the Minister in the future on this issue, please feel free to let me know.
Best wishes
Jeremy
Jeremy Hunt
Member of Parliament
South West Surrey
I’ve attached the reply* so everyone can read it. Here is page 1, and here is page 2.
As you will see, the response is just a stock reply and gives almost no comment whatsoever to the main thrust of the question.
* The Minister’s response was emailed to me as a scanned PDF and it contained my home address and her email and phone numbers. I imported it into Inkscape and obfuscated those details which ended up creating 2 separate files.
Open Source, UK Gov. & Institutional Profligacy
I got a tad annoyed after reading this article by an old journalist friend and colleague Maxwell Cooter. In the story the new CIO of HMRC is reported as saying that there is basically institutional profligacy within the Cabinet Office:
Phil Pavitt, recently-appointed CIO for HM Revenue and Customs, has revealed that attempts to cut government budget is positively discouraged. In a telling anecdote, he says “In my first few weeks of the job I was visited by leading members of the Cabinet Office. In that conversation with me they mentioned I am in the top purchasing club… That means you have tremendous influence on buying power, buying ideas and management and so on.”I said ‘If I reduce costs by 50 per cent what happens?’, ‘Well, you leave the club,’ I was told.”
As you will probably know, I have a vested interest in seeing the Cabinet Office’s Open Source, Open Standards and Re-Use Action Plan[pdf] implemented in full and as quickly as possible. The comment above however, coming from deep within the halls of power, is a clear indication that there seems to be little appetite to drive this Action Plan into, ahem, action. I used the excellent Write to Them service to write to my MP Jeremy Hunt…
Dear Jeremy Hunt,
I run an independent consulting company specialising in an area of software technology called Open Source.
We help organisations of all sizes get best-value by using technologies that are developed for the benefit of the user rather than of the producer.
We have been following the Cabinet Office’s recent Action Plan called “Open Source, Open Standards Re-Use” with some interest and have commented positively on the quality of the document but found there to be little in the way of energy to implement or monitor it’s adoption.
Today, I read an article by a journalist whom I have known for many years which seems to corroborate our opinion that there is little motivation for the status quo to change.
The link to the article is here:
http://blogs.techworld.com/the-blue-screen/2010/02/letting-the-cat-out-of-the-bag/index.htm
“Phil Pavitt, recently-appointed CIO for HM Revenue and Customs, has revealed that attempts to cut government budget is positively discouraged. In a telling anecdote, he says “In my first few weeks ofthe job I was visited by leading members of the Cabinet Office. In that conversation with me they mentioned I am in the top purchasing club… That means you have tremendous influence on buying power, buying ideas and management and so on.”I said ‘If I reduce costs by 50 per cent what happens?’, ‘Well, you leave the club,’ I was told.”
As I understand it, these are civil servants and as such are non-political.
Could you please comment on how a Conservative Government would try to change this apparently appalling attitude towards public expenditure.
Yours sincerely,
Alan Lord
–
The Open Learning Centre
Web: www.theopenlearningcentre.com
A couple of days ago I got an initial reply and, although the response itself isn’t exactly exuberant, Jeremy does indicate one thing I have heard something about before; the Tories policy of splitting massive IT projects into much smaller component parts by using Open Standards. This shows to me they have a decent understanding of the power of Open Standards to break the stranglehold a few monopolies currently have, although of course the proof will be in the delivery… He has also written to the Minister of State at the Cabinet Office to get the Government’s response to my enquiry too.
Here’s his reply in full.
Dear Alan,
Thank you for your email in which you kindly included your own experiences of the Cabinet Offices Action Plan called “Open Source, Open Standards Re-Use”.
Whilst I was pleased to hear you are complimentary about the quality of the document, I was sorry to learn that there seems little in the way of follow-up.
I was also most concerned to read the contents of the article by Maxwell Cooter.
Having spoken to the appropriate Shadow Cabinet Member as you requested, they have assured me that the Conservatives will create a level playing field for open source software by introducing open standards across government that enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller modular components. This will cut licensing costs, reduce risk and enable more small companies to bid for government ICT contracts.
I hope this is helpful and in order to get the Government’s response to the issues you have raised, I have also written to the Rt Hon Angela Smith MP, Minister of State at the Cabinet Office seeking her comments.
As soon as I have received the Minister’s reply, I will of course let you know straight away.
Thank you once again for bringing this important matter to my attention and if I can be of any further assistance in the meantime, please do let me know.
Best wishes
Jeremy
Jeremy Hunt
Member of Parliament
South West Surrey
If you want your MP (or future MP), whatever party they represent, to at least be aware of issues that concern you, please write to them. It is an easy way to voice your opinion. I have found MPs and MEPs to be generally quick to reply, to have understood the points I made and to follow up on issues when they said they would.
PS: Once I have the Minister’s reply I will of course let you know straight away too.
PPS: Can I please be recorded as the first to come up with the phrase “Institutional Profligacy” 
UK Gov Updates Open Source Policy
Remember the Cabinet Office Open Source, Open Standards Re-Use: Action Plan that came out last February?
Well, they’ve updated it. And the bits that they have changed are most welcome:
4. This Strategy does not represent a wholesale change to the Open Source Open Standards Reuse Strategy published in February 2009. It has been updated to take account of comments posted on www.writetoreply.org. The key changes to policy are:
- We will require our suppliers to provide evidence of consideration of open source solutions during procurement exercises – if this evidence is not provided, bidders are likely to be disqualified from the procurement.
- Where a ‘perpetual licence’ has been purchased from a proprietary supplier (which gives the appearance of zero cost to that project), we will require procurement teams to apply a ‘shadow’ licence price to ensure a fair price
comparison of total cost of ownership. We have also defined the shadow licence cost as either:1. the list price of that licence from the supplier with no discounts applied, or
2. the public sector price that has been agreed through a ‘Crown’ agreement.
- We have clarified that we expect all software licences to be purchased on the basis of reuse across the public sector, regardless of the service environment it is operating within. This means that when we launch the Government Cloud, there will be no additional cost to the public sector of transferring licences into the Cloud.
Which is nice
But unfortunately, as has been said widely before and again with this update, this is an action plan without any teeth. There is no enforcement, there is no monitoring and there are no penalties for not implementing the plan.
It’s all been said already so this is a short post. Until the Cabinet Office can get this implemented at a departmental level across the government and enforced, it remains essentially a "nice-to-have" objective but not much more.
The Cabinet Office have an Open Source aggregation service that collects various commentary from around the world based on various tags. This one needs the #ukgovOSS tag if you want to write your own piece or even tweet/dent about it.
PS: We have also made a remark or two about this update on our recently started (admittedly rather quietly) and more business-centric Open Source blog that’s on our main web site. We’ve called the blog The Way Out. Please feel free to drop by or add to your feed readers.
Software Patents: The new MAD
With the recent news of Microsoft being told to stop selling MS Word in the US due to it’s infringement of a patent owned by i4i I am really hopeful that perhaps, just perhaps, someone will start to realise just how MAD this all is.
Reading the first story I linked to, there is a reasonably understandable explanation of the patent in question but lets be honest here. Does this sound like an truly new and innovative invention?
“What we have developed at i4i is what’s customarily referred to as ‘customer-centric’ or ‘custom XML,’ which is allowing people to create customer-driven schema — we’ll call it templates or forms. So, while XML is used to tag and to mark the data that’s created, our technology is used to create the whole schema and the management of the data.”
They’ve managed to patent the ability to create your own schema by the sounds of that. Isn’t that what XML is for?
Anyway, I can’t see the good ‘ole boys really winning in the long run. I’m sure it will get over turned when hopefully someone shows up with some prior-art. But it seems to me that with this ridiculous system in the States, they are building their own new version of the Cold War. Remember Mutually Assured Destruction? That’s where they are now.
Businesses like Microsoft, IBM and others build vast portfolios of patents on the most ridiculous things not for their inherent value, but mainly as a safeguard against being sued for infringing someone else’s equally ridiculous patent. ‘If you sue me for patent xyz, then we’ll sue you with zyx’. Then we have the other wonderful group of [ahem] businesses known as Patent Trolls who bring nothing to the party except litigation. Nice.
Who wins out of all this in the long run? The worst group of parasites on the planet (yes, even worse than estate agents): Lawyers.
Surely, the US Government must see the stupidity and waste that this daft situation has created? I really hope that this is the litigious straw that will break the back of the patent camel.
Finally, get this. The last paragraph of that story reports on a patent that Microsoft has just been granted, which they applied for several years ago.
Word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML
A word processor including a native XML file format is provided. The well formed XML file fully represents the word-processor document, and fully supports 100% of word-processor’s rich formatting. There are no feature losses when saving the word-processor documents as XML. A published XSD file defines all the rules behind the word-processor’s XML file format. Hints may be provided within the XML associated files providing applications that understand XML a shortcut to understanding some of the features provided by the word-processor. The word-processing document is stored in a single XML file. Additionally, manipulation of word-processing documents may be done on computing devices that do not include the word-processor itself.
Hmmm – this appears to have far reaching implications. OOXML, ODF, any word processor supporting XML file formats… Jeez. How the f**k can you call this an invention?
Please, UK Government and the EU Commission, don’t let the patent trolls of the world make you think that software patents are a “good thing”.
