Recently, I had the opportunity of listening a presentation about a particular e-government initiative. The project gathered several municipalities and centralized the processes for permission requests (construction-related permits and other red tape activities). The idea is really good. There is a centralized “cloud” that handles all the process and is shared by all municipalities. Therefore, there is only a single department in charge of the support of the system. All the local governments maybe have different requirements for their permits, but they agreed on standards for the forms and to limit the kind of information that can be manipulated by the system.
The project has had a good reception, and they are proud of that. I congratulated them, but I was left with some questions. The speakers keep using the word “business” and “business model” during the whole talk. At the beginning I thought that was only a figure of speech, but then I asked about the license of the software developed for the project. Of course it was not open at all.
My question is simple. Given the fact that you already invested money developing a solution for a governmental office (it does not matter the level), doesn’t it make sense to liberate the code? There are hundreds or municipalities that can take your code and improve it. You (the pioneers) can benefit from that. You are going to have an army of people improving your system, and also you will collaborate with fellow citizens.
People forget that the business of government is not business as usual.
