Open Source

I’m a member of the Cabinet Office Skunkworks project ‘dotgovlabs’, where ‘innovators’ post ‘solutions’ in different ‘challenge’ areas. Rather than write anything more (that you won’t read) about dotgotlabs, here is a video produced to explain the project … including me and others with great faces for radio. With interests in open source, open standards and interoperability and with experience in and around the NHS, I’ve contributed to many solutions posted in the Healthcare challenge. I’ve commented on the interoperability challenges facing ‘Solutions’ such as ‘Give Patients Access to Data’ (a challenge involving Patient Opinion and MyDex, see previous post on Brent Council opening up resident data access) and on the use of social media in healthcare solutions … and the privacy implications there in…. I’ve been contributing heavily to a solution posted by Tim Knight which proposed greater use of open source practices in the NHS - provisionally titled Open Me Project (login req; email me for invitation). The goal of the solution is to provide a framework and supporting tools for the collaborative development of open source solutions for NHS organisations and commercial healthcare providers. The solution has been voted up to progress from ‘Buzz’ stage to ‘Teaming’ stage. As part of the incubation process for solutions, DotGovLabs have engaged the support of Experts from Departments of state and the Private Sector to give feedback and pose challenging questions to teams. This weekend David Ostler, Chairman of unitedHealth posted feedback on our solution and several others. I thought I would repost the exchange here. ...

According to Publictechnology.net, the Liberal Democrats have decided to go for Open Source software for organisational infrastructure. The LDs have selected an open-source consultancy and technical services business in Rugby, Credativ, to migrate and support crucial parts of the LibDems tech needs. I’m very pleased to see this commitment to free and open-source software by a major political party!

Hacking the Networked Society. Abstract: The dynamic between free-software and open-source is often misunderstood by social and political theorists. As a consequence it is also under-theorised within socio-political theory. In this paper, I show how philosophies of free/libre, open-source and commons regimes have engendered new forms of socio-political consumption and new political economies of meaning. My emphasis on the interplay between the local and the global/structure and agency, shows new ways of ‘thinking’ the cosmopolitan, sedimented in the interconnected networks of the technical age....

I’ve been busy reviewing and replanning my dissertation project - only five weeks to go until hand-in! I’ve cut a lot out since my proposal last year, tightening my focus and shortening my reading lists. My four papers now look something like this… Who Governs in a Networked Society (final draft complete) - My first chapter is concerned with the depoliticisation of government and the politicisation of the social world in a global networked society....

@smiths now has wiki space at a cost of around £2000 for the software licenses (1). Wiki’s, along with blogs, are a prominent feature of the contemporary easy to read, easy to edit web. The term wiki is derived from the Hawaiian word for quick. Wiki’s are websites that are quick and easy to contribute to and to edit. The software purchased, Confluence, is merely an implementation of the wiki idea, corporatised, privatised and packaged up as an ‘enterprise level collaboration tool’....