I’m sure I could give a host of reasons for the lack of opposition.  But first, foremost, and without peer is the great work of the staff in my office.  Over nearly 13 years they have provided great service, fair and honest elections, and progressive advances in every area of this office.  Every week I have multiple people who approach me and  compliment the work of my office.  The confidence and support of the public in general is reflected in those compliments and hopefully is reflected in the lack of opposition.

Thanks so much to my staff who has served so well and earned such trust.

For the record, I first requested this data on December 28, 2009.  I received a “We’re in the process” response on January 8, 2010.  I followed up on February 18, 2010.  On February 24, 2010 I received another “We’re in the process” response.  I don’t know if yesterday’s posting was the prompt for Pew turning over the spreadsheet or if it was mere coincidence.

Of course, like the mistake made on the OCVR we don’t have independent proof of the reliability of what is being presented.

Plenty more on this topic in future days.

You can read the suit here.

We’ll keep you updated with additional information and filings.

As in any public policy initiative, the case needs to be made to the policy makers.  Unfortunately, they are often part of the problem as I noted earlier.   But each impediment to open source that I mentioned yesterday can be addressed and needs to be.

Second, there needs to be a broader initiative that includes more than a single unit of government.  The Champaign County Clerk’s office is unique in what we have done.  I could hardly expect our successes to be matched by individuals.  However, if more units of government were brought into a project, it will become doable.

Third, a coalition of governments needs to pick a project to begin working on.  One possibility is a project that would be smaller and less critical to establish a process to develop.  At the same time, governments need to identify those areas ripest for future development that are critical to their processes and which can enhance our services to citizens.

GOSCON is an organization that has been formed to begin the process of developing open source solutions for government.  I’ve wanted to go their conferences in the past, but our schedule for elections has gotten in the way.  This year their schedule meets up better with mine and I’m attending their conference in DC on November 5th.

It will be interesting to take the temperature of this movement and to see how their ideas can be of benefit to my office, the County, and maybe the state.  I’ll be writing about it when I return.

Start with the deep pockets of government.  Government can spend money like no one else and rarely feels the pain when they misspend it.  In fact, misspending money often just results in an influx of more money with the suggestion made that not enough was allocated the first time.  Across the country you can bet that most bad software buys are followed by another bad software buy.

Follow that up with fear.  A little fear in this area is a good idea, because it prompts prudence and hopefully foresight.  But when it paralyzes, it’s to the disadvantage of the public.  Open source solutions present an ongoing fear for governments.  Instead of making a single decision about a software vendor, you end up making a series of decisions over many years.

Passing the buck is a favorite past time of today’s government officials.  Buying prepackaged software is part of that culture and links to fear.  When organizations develop software in house, even within an intergovernmental collaborative environment, they can be expected to be answerable for the performance of that software.  Much less so with a vendor or consultant. Once that decision is made to grant a single company the responsibility to develop a software solution, the government body is largely off the hook.  They take victory laps if it works well, but when it doesn’t work well, they practice their well worn fingerpointing.

I’m from Illinois, so perhaps corruption is more on my mind than most.  Nevertheless, software and consulting contracts are a ripe area for white collar patronage.  With ambiguous standards to meet to get a contract, and further ambiguity in meeting the terms, it can be easy to steer contracts to preferred individuals.

Looking just within their own organization, few local governments will find the programming talent to meet all their needs.  The best open source solutions are probably beyond the reach of all but the most wealthy governments.  If you’re not one of them, a prepackaged solution looks pretty attractive.

As a corollary, open source puts at least some strain on the organization’s resources.  And it often comes at the top.  If you’re a manager of a government unit, that often means that you’ll be spending more time shepherding a solution for your organization than if you had farmed it out.  That time may be precious or that manager might be lazy.

There are plenty of impediments.  But there are answers to all of them.  On the financial side, governments are broke and need to find cheaper solutions.  Fear, buck passing, talent, and time demands are problems answered with dynamic programming groups that share responsibility.  The benefits are so great that we have to find a way to work past the impediments.

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.

At this time, we have no proprietary software solutions in our office, except for the program that designs and counts our ballots and an add on for scanning, imaging, and OCRing  documents.  Our property tax program is designed and maintained by the County IT department and also serves the Treasurer’s office and the Supervisor of Assessments Office.  Our applications for voter registration, notaries, assumed business names, births, marriages and a variety of other items have been designed within our office.

There is no shortage of software vendors for government administration.  Many of the products are high quality, but my experience has been that most are overpriced and lack the flexibility that our organization desires.  We purchased a marriage license program in my first year as County Clerk that was serviceable, but doesn’t even come close to matching the efficiency of our current system.  I have examined a number of the voter registration programs that exist.  I saw only one that impressed me and its price tag was a million dollars, not including the ongoing maintenance and licensing costs.

We’ve developed a system in house that mirrors much of the best of what we’ve seen in other systems.  It’s paid for, no licensing fees, and it gives us additional flexibility and the ability to make modifications based on future needs.  We are currently making upgrades to the system thanks to a federal grant under the Election Administration Commission’s Data Collection Grant. While we will be compliant with the grant requirements by the end of the year, we anticipate continued development of our system until March of next year.  Because we develop using SQL Server for our data and Visual Studio for our front end, our software would not fall under the open source umbrella, but the benefits from the software are much like what you’d get in the open source environment.

Because our system is developed within our office, we can make modifications more quickly and at a lower cost than other systems.  As the federal government and states begin to look at more on line digital government solutions, the need to modify current software solutions will be even more important.

Going it alone, so to speak, is a challenge.  The dividends are substantial, but there is no doubt that it can be very time consuming in the short run.  It would be difficult to quantify the time I have put into software development, but it certainly is measured in the thousands of hours.  Few County Clerk Offices in the state or country have those types of resources available.

That’s the background that brings me to one of the more positive notes out of the Democracy Index (a book I’ve spent considerable time panning).  Gerken makes a call that is long overdue.  It is for open source solutions to government technology issues.

The preferred method for most governments to address their technology issues is to find a solution off the shelf or to pay a consultant to put together a solution or to do a hybrid of the two.  All are costly, and all are legendary for not delivering a product that is vibrant, dynamic and flexible.

Here in Champaign county we are seeing it in the criminal justice area.  We have paid millions for a software solution that already is showing its age and limitations.  We are having similar issues with our payroll system.

Both the criminal justice software and payroll software are functions that every county in America has to deal with.  It is incomprehensible to think that it couldn’t be done at a far lower cost (with likely better results) by collaboration among those counties in an open source environment.

Which brings us to open source software whereby the code for the program is available to all users and can be modified in a way that suits a particular organization.  Modifications to the original code are made available to all users.  There are no licensing fees and no impediments to developing the software to meet the changing needs of the organization.

My next posts will examine these questions.  What are the benefits to open source?  What are the factors that impede those solutions?  How do we make the way for open source solutions in the future?