Has Whitehall already opened up to open source?

By Nicholas Oliver, Project Manager & Creative Technologist

This morning, Rory Cellan-Jones posted on the BBC blog about an FOI request that had been made in order to better understand the government’s software expenditure.

Can Whitehall open up to open source

What’s Whitehall’s attitude to software procurement? A cynic might sum it up as “nobody ever got sacked for buying Microsoft”.

With such a large number of government websites out there and over 294,000,000 pages being indexed by Google on the .gov.uk domain, I thought it was worth a deeper look to better understand where open source software was being used to best effect.

Starting out with one of the world’s most popular open source content management system, Drupal, a number of colleagues had a dig around to find some websites that were being powered by Drupal. A pretty sizeable list of 26 websites appeared:  http://groups.drupal.org/government-sites#UK

Highlights of which include:

This might not come as so much of a surprise when you see that even our American counterparts are in on the Drupal action, with the CMS powering one of the world’s most visited websites: www.whitehouse.gov .

Up next it was time to address the cynic’s possible sum up of “nobody ever got sacked for buying Microsoft”. Another shocker that might surprise many is that Umbraco (the favoured CMS of Microsoft) is also free and open source! In-fact, Microsoft is such a big fan of this CMS, they have even dedicated some web space to talking about how great it is: http://www.microsoft.com/web/umbraco . Will this be enough of an excuse to use open source without running the non-Microsoft gauntlet?

Using a Google search modifier (inurl:.gov.uk*umbraco), I went on a snoop to see what Umbraco sites showed up: again, a rather impressive list of approximately 50 sites albeit this time, more regional or smaller organisations within the government; most likely due to its more user friendly administration interface. A few that have come up include:

Another, more visually appealing government run site that is Umbraco powered is http://www.sportwales.org.uk/

This is of course, a very quick snapshot at what is out there and easily accessible in the public domain, but it is a great start towards showing that in fact the government really is trying to embrace open source content management systems. In order to fully achieve a transparent and accessible data source, the government will need to up it’s game over the next few years and push open source to the front of it’s IT/digital agenda.

We will continue to dig around for government websites using open source solutions but in the meantime – happy Monday!

 

Posted on 5 Sep 2011 by precedentcomms
Tagged: CMS, Content Management System, Digital, Drupal, Government, Microsoft, Online, Open Source, Umbraco, Web
  • http://twitter.com/FD_Phil Philip Campbell

    Open source itself doesn’t guarantee a lower cost project, especially as license costs are invariably a small part of an overall project cost. I am not sure the benefit of advocating open source to the government, but rather focus on better project management & delivery to ensure better value for money for the UK taxpayer.

    • http://twitter.com/nicoliver86 Nicholas Oliver

      I’d absolutely agree. In specific, individual builds the cost can be just as based on the management of the project and requirements as it can on the solution being used (open source / enterprise). 
      My strong feeling would be that open source needs to be used in order to make the data and functionality more available. A great example of data.gov.uk opening up can be seen via http://data.gov.uk/blog/datagovuk-releases-open-source-codeIn the long term, with extreme information management & storage becoming more widespread – open source systems will hopefully enable individuals and organisations to use the data for a range of projects – without the need for enterprise license fees. 

      • Mark Sherwin

        Nic some interesting findings on the scale of Open Source CMS use in gov. As always it’s not the polarised debate both Open Source Advocates and the big Enterprise CMS players such as Sitecore or Alterian often want to concentrate on. It’s all about the detail and scope of the individual requirement. If what you need is a simple web site Open Source has to make sense. Then again if what you need is a highly bespoke solution where you are not going to leverage much ‘out of the box’ functionality offered by an enterprise product, then again the benefit of an open source framework and the added advantage of creating a valuable resource for cross government use has to make sense. In the middle are sophisticated websites that need to capitalise on a range of sophisticated yet generic capabilities such as implicit/explicit personalisation linked to integrated analytics, multi lingual/ multi site management and integration with other major enterprise software suites. In these cases the appeal of Open Source may indeed be a false economy if lots of bespoke development time could have been avoided and a faster time to Market achieved by harnessing existing functionality in a prebuilt, tested and supported project. It needs a cool head, a good understanding of scope and an appreciation of total cost of ownership to be able to offer best advice on a case by case basis. One thing is certain with the drive for cost savings in government the shift to digital engagement by government can only accelerate. There will be room forplenty if open source and enterprise products in this new marketplace. Let’s just hope that the decisions are made based on a sound understanding of best fit requirements, not edict or induvidual evangelism. Thanks again for a thought provoking post.

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