Open source programming for government provides an opportunity for cost savings, greater efficiency and flexibility, and greatly enhanced services to the public.

Currently, government generally seeks IT solutions through vendors and consultants.  For example, the State Board of Elections has used Catalyst Consulting to design and implement our statewide voter registration file.  When Champaign County conducted a technology assessment in 2007, consultants recommended that the county move away from our custom applications and move instead toward “packaged software.”

I doubt that our consultants put a whole lot of study into open source solutions.  Rather, they looked at our own stand alone development abilities as they put together a strategy for Champaign County’s IT future.

If they had looked at open source, they would have found much that makes sense for government.

To begin, government is not in competition with anyone (or shouldn’t be).  Unlike the private sector, governments have no vested interest in denying cost effective solutions to others.  In fact, in many areas, government actually has an interest in intergovernmental cooperation.  For example, on a host of issues relating to property taxes, the data from Champaign County is valuable to other governments.  Additionally, the changes to that data made by other governments could be seamlessly provided to the County if the two organizations shared software.

Next, collaboration on software solutions can only lead to more productivity and efficiency.  This collaboration should be an ongoing process.  What often happens currently is that a few units of government identify a need and a vendor or consultant responds to that need.  The software developed hopefully meets that need at that time for those organizations.  However, we don’t live in a static environment.  Other needs arise, additional best practices are identified, and technologies change.  When circumstances change, packaged software solutions are often incapable of responding to them, either because of a lack of skill or finances or because companies want you to pay for a total upgrade rather than a modest change to your current system.

When you purchase a software solution, you’re taking a chance on whether the company you are working with is going to be around in a decade and whether they are still going to be able to meet your changing needs.  Open source eliminates this very real problem for local governments and replaces that problem with a dynamic process to improve every software solution by bringing the best in government together on an ongoing basis.

On the financial side, open source solutions will save money.  Even with a modest amount of collaboration, medium to large size governments will see savings.  The more who join in, the greater the savings.  For smaller units of government, it will be less about saving because many of them aren’t even looking for software solutions to some of the issues.  Instead, what it means is that these smaller units will be able to take advantage of efficiencies that were before only available to the largest units of government.

Additional millions in savings will be realized as hefty licensing fees go away.  Further, software vendors often force unnecessary yet expensive upgrades onto their clients with the very real threat that they’ll cease to service clients who don’t upgrade.  Governments pay for the upgrade and often pay for transitional training necessary to go to the next software version.

For citizens, open source solutions mean more responsiveness.   Currently, the needs and desires of the community are held hostage to the skills of a software vendor.  With open source, governments can go out and find the person with the necessary skills to implement what the community wants.  In fact, when governments fail, the citizens themselves can find the person.

Next week, I’ll write about the impediments that have prevented the benefits listed here from coming to fruition.

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