Government's New Zealand Digital Strategy lacks vision?
The government is asking us to comment on the most recent incarnation of their New Zealand Digital Strategy. You have until 12th May 2008 to submit a comment (The consultation period has been extended to 23rd May 2008). My gut feeling is that I’ll have more impact on NZ’s digital future by adding more features to TheyWorkForYou.co.nz, than by rehashing the wording of a strategy document.
We must ask ourselves why free open source software is not discussed in the government’s Digital Strategy. Is it that the government is addicted to a single proprietary software vendor? How much do they pay that vendor each year in proprietary software license fees? How does that affect NZ’s trade balance? What are the opportunity costs? These are all economic questions that you’d think the Ministry of Economic Development would be considering when evolving a strategy for the country.
I’m quite passionate about this whole area, as I imagine you are too if you’re reading this blog post. Have you made submissions on digital strategy drafts in the past? I have, and noticed my comments never made it into the reports themselves. Government, tell me why I should devote time to giving you free consulting yet again, when I’ve seen you overlook issues that you find uncomfortable or don’t understand?
The Ministry of Economic Development have added a new enabler of change to the strategy this time round: collaboration. Collaboration now sits alongside the enablers they’d identified in 2005: connection, confidence, and content. In a previous submission, I’d proposed software ‘code’ should be included as an enabler.
The strategy hardly mentions software, and free open source software is only referenced in passing during a side-bar case study. Software programmers are not mentioned at all. Imagine you wrote a creative media strategy that only talks about distribution companies and audiences, and failed to mention writers and their scripts?
We know that a restaurant requires chefs and recipes, alongside pots and pans, customers, and ingredients. Without chefs you might be able to run a fast food franchise, but that’s about it. In a similar vein, a successful digital ecology in New Zealand requires programmers and software code, alongside computer hardware, digital content and broadband.
The free open source software movement has shown you don’t need hierarchical command-and-control organisational structures to create value producing software. We know that business obtains value from free open source software. For example Linux, a popular open source operating system, is used in the operation of organisations such as Google and the New Zealand Stock Exchange. Linux has been authored by hundreds of developers world-wide, some employed to do so and some working voluntarily. If you’re wondering, the key difference from proprietary software is that Free Software code is held in a ‘commons’ allowing anyone to use, modify and re-release it.
My vision for New Zealand is that it adopts and leverages free open source software in communities, in government and in business. The proposition is that a virtuous economic cycle will emerge as less money is spent importing proprietary licenses from overseas. Instead that money is retained in the NZ economy for investment in digital service provision and innovation based on a free open source software infrastructure operated by local technical expertise.
Teach children to code with free open source software and you’ll see a flourishing digital future for New Zealand.
You can make a submission via the
New Zealand Digital Strategy website up until 5.00pm Friday 23 May 2008.
