Enabling Local Government Innovation with Open Source Software
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FOSS4G SotM Oceania 201947 / 52
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00:00
Open sourceLibrary (computing)Local ringProjective planeData managementQuicksortWordPhysical systemSoftwareMultiplication signOpen setComputer animation
01:37
Library (computing)Data managementPhysical systemOpen sourceSI-EinheitenOpen sourceSource codeAreaProjective planeMereologySoftwareExpert systemRight angleQuicksortMultiplication signWave packetLocal ringSoftware bugInformation technology consultingSpacetimeEntire functionBuildingCodePower (physics)Software frameworkContext awarenessShared memoryMultiplicationPhysical systemEmailTrailSelf-organizationData managementElectronic mailing listMobile appPatch (Unix)Cache (computing)GeometryLibrary (computing)Moment (mathematics)Direction (geometry)Data storage deviceDialectSoftware developerService (economics)Level (video gaming)Web 2.0Extension (kinesiology)Vector potentialSimilarity (geometry)Prime ideal
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AerodynamicsLevel (video gaming)Physical systemData storage deviceBitSoftware developerOpen sourceExtension (kinesiology)SI-EinheitenElectric generatorTraffic reportingGeometryServer (computing)
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Term (mathematics)Product (business)Complex (psychology)Computing platformService (economics)SoftwareData storage deviceEntire functionLatent heatFront and back endsTesselationDesign by contractRevision controlStaff (military)Local ringOpen sourceQuicksortCloud computingSpacetimeHeat transferData managementMultiplication signSelf-organizationRight angleProjective planeOffice suiteExpert systemStudent's t-testMoment (mathematics)Vector potentialFirewall (computing)CollaborationismMappingPurchasingServer (computing)Computer hardwareWebsite
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Open sourceQuicksortFront and back endsService (economics)InformationHeat transferSelf-organizationMereologyWebsiteBitData conversionPlastikkarteGame controllerCloud computingComputing platformSoftware testingPoint cloudFunctional (mathematics)AuthenticationMultiplication signPoint (geometry)Physical systemStandard deviationMusical ensembleMathematicsSoftwareTouch typingChemical equationOnline helpCache (computing)Different (Kate Ryan album)Right angle
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:02
I'm going to come to the topic of the day, and that really is, why should you be using open source software? And for those of you who've read the abstract to this talk, I've sort of given the answer away in there. But I really want to use this opportunity to focus on two issues that I think are
00:21
probably the most important things about open source, at least for me personally. And if I have time at the end, I'll also talk about what I think is the major challenge to overcome. Whenever I speak about open source and innovation, there is one project from New Zealand that
00:44
really, I think, has a very inspiring story, and that project is very relevant to local government and not at all relevant to GIS. But I'll still talk about it, and that's the COHA open source library management system. COHA is a world-leading, I should say, library management system.
01:06
It's used in New Zealand and Australia, widely used in the U.S. and the U.K. Think all of Turkey's public libraries are running off COHA. That's used in Scandinavia. And it started about 20 years ago in 1999, just 100 kilometers away from here in Horofinua,
01:25
when the local library trust realized that their existing proprietary software couldn't cope with the year 2000 issue, and some of you may still remember that. And they also realized that that existing proprietary vendor had gone out of business,
01:45
and there was no one there to pick up support and to fix the issues, so much for the myth of no support and open source. So they had to relatively quickly find a local vendor to work with and create a solution,
02:02
and they've done that basically overnight, created the COHA library management system and made sure that the solution is open source, particularly to avoid problems alike they've had previously in the future. And what I find most interesting about COHA really isn't so much the global reach of the project.
02:26
It's just that over time, more and more people from all over the world have started contributing to COHA, you know, translating the software, improving it, contributing bug fixes, raising issues. In fact, the very first contribution to COHA came from Detroit,
02:42
which is far away from Horofinua, for those of you who aren't familiar with geography, and it didn't come from a library. It came from a car manufacturer in Detroit who realized that, hey, this is a really cool system to manage our internal documentation and manuals and other instruction sheets, and they've just gone away quietly and developed the features
03:05
that they wanted and thought, all right, look, we've used COHA as our foundation. We've built a couple of features, and we're contributing those back to the community. The key thing here for me is that they didn't have to ask for permission first. They didn't have to buy a license fee.
03:21
They didn't have to go through a particular vendor to do that. They were able to just do it, and so I think this potential for unlocking innovation, this freedom really, is the power that comes with open source. If I'm myself solving a problem today, it's highly likely
03:41
that someone else has already solved a similar project or problem in the past, and if I can take their solution and improve it and adapt it to my business reality and then contribute my solution back to the community, I think everybody profits in the end. And COHA, you know, 20 years down the track, is still going strong, still receiving patches, still receiving major releases.
04:02
It's all community driven these days with a couple of prime vendors supporting it, us included, but it's still very much a powerful example of how open source in local government and local services can really drive innovation.
04:21
And I think, and everybody else so far has touched upon this, this leads me to the second aspect that I want to mention. That's all about community. And community sort of in both directions, both outwards into like the global, but also into the more local areas.
04:41
And obviously the global part is obvious, right? We wouldn't be here today talking about GIS if it wasn't for all those folks who've come before us doing what they've been doing, developing great software, putting open source, legal frameworks in place, fighting for that freedom to share software solutions and inspect source codes and build solutions.
05:07
And we all know that by, I think by adopting those open source technologies, we become part of this global community, right? So if you work in a small organisation, if you work in remote parts of the country
05:21
and local government, you suddenly have access to this global community of researchers and developers and thinkers who are all extremely helpful people and extremely knowledgeable people. And we've heard previously, I can't remember from whom, that when you reach out to them, they tend to get back to you within a day or two
05:43
and help you solve your problems. And I just yesterday, for fun, sort of looked at my GitHub history over the last half year ever since we kind of started this GIS stuff. I'm not the technical person on the project. I've got multiple code commits in open source projects over the last half year.
06:04
I've got multiple issues raised. I've had multiple discussions on mailing lists just because I think we're doing this stuff at the moment. But I think it is really important to not forget about the local aspect of open source
06:20
because it allows organisations to work with and to connect to local experts and users. So rather than having to pull in the Esri's or Red Hat's or IBM's of the world, there is nothing wrong with that. It's often great to bring up local talent who may instinctively understand the business realities of what it's like to work and live
06:44
in a particular area and to run a business in that area. And those folks, because we're using open source, are free to inspect the source code, are free to become experts in the technology. They do not have to go and climb up the corporate training ladder in a big corporate
07:01
or come back as a consultant from overseas or afar. And I think we've already touched on this community aspect in the context of COA briefly, but we're also doing this in the GIS space. So if you look at YRA District Council, for example,
07:21
their entire GIS stack is built on open source software. Do your server, geo web cache, map store, what have you. They have two GIS stacks. They have a public system and an internal system. The public system we look after, the internal system is managed by a very talented, smart guy they have locally.
07:42
And that just works for them and it works for us. And everyone involved. They're also forming communities with other New Zealand regions. So for example, together with Otra Hanga District Council, they have created an extension to geo server and map store that lets you automatically generate Limelight reports.
08:06
They're not fully fledged, but they do pull in data from Linz. They pull in data from internal systems. They pull in data from the internal GIS systems and they serve that to the end user automatically with the click of a button. Something that they wouldn't have been able to do by themselves.
08:23
They probably wouldn't necessarily have been able to get a commercial vendor to do for them just for fun, but by getting together and pooling a little bit of money together, they were able to pay a developer and a small team of people to do that over a couple of weeks. And I think this community aspect really combined with this freedom to innovate freely
08:47
and to not have to ask for permission is really at the heart of what makes open source so powerful for solving business problems. However, I think open source is overly complicated.
09:03
Very often I think I find that as a purchaser of IT products or services, proprietary vendors tend to give me a solution. It may not be perfect. It may not even be a solution to my problem, but it is a solution and it comes
09:20
with documentation and specification and a contract and a license and, you know, I can do my due diligence and I know what I'm getting and I know what it's going to do and I can sort of weigh up the benefits of getting that solution versus paying them a lot of money to give me their product. With open source, on the other hand, it's often just like getting the tools.
09:44
Like I want to build a house and I buy timber, nails and hammers down from the hardware shop, have it all delivered to site and then I stand there and go like, right, now what? And, you know, that might be totally fine if I happen to be a builder or if I happen
10:03
to really want to learn how to do it and if I have the time and the money to invest to do that sort of stuff. But very often when I'm in the market for a solution, it's exactly because I'm not that expert and I cannot become that expert and I don't have anyone
10:21
on the team to bring up to speed. And that I think makes it incredibly hard to build and buy and maintain an open source solution. If I'm a small local council, if I'm a small organization, I've got to deal with all of this and more just to get a basic GIS back end running.
10:42
I need servers, I need to sort out my firewalls, my data storage. Does it need to be in New Zealand? Can it be on a cloud provider in Australia? You know, I need to render maps. I need to cache tiles maybe. How does it all work? How does it all fit together? And then what if that one person who's doing my IT leaves the company?
11:03
What happens next? Because I cannot afford a huge team of IT experts. And so to me this really is, well, I mean, A, it's obviously a huge deal for small organizations, but it's a problem that's worth solving as an open source community. And I think we're seeing a couple of projects globally that are starting
11:24
to pull together subprojects and distributing them as a coherent whole. And that's sort of the space that we're trying to navigate as well as Catalysts at the moment. So on this one hand, we have this huge potential for innovation and for collaboration for actually delivering value to our customers.
11:43
And on the other hand, we've got this almost overwhelming complexity of how do we put the stack together and how do we maintain it long term and who takes care of it when it falls over on a public holiday. So I'm quite lucky to work with some amazing partners inside my company
12:04
and in local government in New Zealand to try and tackle this complexity. I think together we've created a managed platform where we can now, I think, create an entire GIS backend deployment within less than a minute
12:22
on pretty much any cloud provider out there that can be looked after either by us or by any skilled IT department. And the idea here really is that someone like us can take care of the more boring stuff of keeping the service running, of making sure everything ticks over,
12:44
of making sure everything stays up to date and on the lightest maintained version, while our customers and our partners can focus on delivering value either to and either using their own staff or a local vendor or whomever they prefer.
13:05
So that's sort of our take on reducing complexity. I'm sure there are other ways of doing that. I'm definitely keen to hear your thoughts on the topic. But just to summarize, I think for me, free and open source software done right, I think is the enabler for innovation and for community to thrive.
13:24
And I think both innovation and community are things that are desperately needed globally and locally in the IT space. Thank you. I have one question, which is, who is your team made up of?
13:48
And does a customer ever ask for you to be embedded to say, give them, like have some knowledge transfers so their internal people can also manage things long term?
14:00
Okay, so that's two questions, right? I'll answer the first one first. Our team is currently small. We're about three people out of our Christchurch office. We are bringing on another three students over summer who can work on actual open source projects, which is going to be great.
14:21
And that small size makes it possible for us to operate relatively quick and agile. But obviously, we've got this 300 people strong company behind us, which means that all the stuff we do is peer reviewed and is stable and can be picked up by anyone in the company.
14:41
The other question, yes and no. No one has explicitly asked us to sit down with them and do knowledge transfer and bring someone up to speed. But yes, it has been explicitly part of our conversations when we sat down with partners and we're trying to figure out how we can do this together.
15:04
So the people we're working with are fairly small organizations. They may not have an IT team or they may have struggled finding the right people to staff an IT team. And until that happens, we help them or we're happy to bring anybody else up to speed, of course.
15:28
I've often found open source software restrictive at times with licensing. Have you got any recommendations around licenses to use or moving forward if there's any complicated issues in mixing different pieces of open source software
15:44
that may have conflicting licenses? Yes, I do. I'm not a lawyer, though, and that is a bit of a legal minefield sometimes. No, I don't have an answer to the question right now.
16:03
I find most standard open source licenses that are currently out there, BSD, Apache and all the rest are open enough for our purposes. Of course, they do require us to make whatever solution we do open source as well, which we're very happy to do.
16:23
But there are other people in our organizations in the legal sort of site who are a much better place to help you. So if you give me your card afterwards, I'm happy to put you in touch with someone. The balance of getting your bespoke system against getting that package,
16:45
at which point does it tilt too far over? Either way, like, is there a particular point that you just sort of go hands up, can't do it?
17:00
I don't think there is a particular point. We've designed the system so that as a customer, you could essentially jump into any part of the stack and modify it. We do have some automated testing around making sure that functionality works, such as authentication, such as the cache isn't broken,
17:24
you're not pulling in crazy things from websites we don't trust. As long as all those tests pass, we're quite happy to roll with whatever changes you make. But because it's really sort of a foundation and backend service,
17:41
it allows people to build whatever front-end solution on top of it that they like. That's all APIs all the way down in the end.
18:02
Kia ora. I just wanted to ask you how you, because when you've got open source and everything like that, on the cultural landscape within New Zealand, there's a lot of information by Manafenua and iwi and everything like that. It's culturally sensitive, so there's a little bit of an issue there
18:23
about how to protect those layers of information Do you have a suggestion about how you would do that? Yeah, look, there are two aspects to answering that. The first one is that with what we do, the data firmly belongs to the user who's using our platform,
18:42
and they will have to put controls in place to make sure that the data is not shared in any way that's inappropriate. The other thing, and that's a bit of a vendor pitch, is that we're trying to keep data within New Zealand.
19:01
We're running a public cloud service completely based within New Zealand, and that makes sure that whatever data is stored within the platform, as long as it runs on our cloud, falls exclusively under New Zealand jurisdiction and not under any other country's jurisdiction. But really, I think it's important to architect for those sort of problems
19:26
from the start before even thinking about adding data to a platform. I hope that helps.