UKGovOSS - Open Source Government CommunityPublic Sector Forums

As a friend said recently:  ‘There’s nothing like a live beta to keep you on your toes!’

Truer words were never spoken. Setting up the site has been something of a learning process - with one issue we’ve learned much about being social networking spam.

We’ve had two reports this week of spambots entering the site. This is annoying to us all, so to counter this we’ve put in place a CAPTCHA to prevent spambots registering, a real-time IP address block to prevent known spammers accessing the site, spam protection on comments, an email registration blacklist and are looking at what else we can do on top of what we’ve got.

The ‘Send message’ link is now only visible to contacts on your Friends List, which should also help to prevent unwanted messages to some extent.

My apologies if you’ve been affected and many thanks for your understanding.

UKGovOSS.org wouldn’t be here without the support of Jack Pickard of The Pickards Information Services, who helped to build, develop and customise the site.

Well-known to those in the local government web arena, Jack is an experienced and accomplished web developer with a real passion for social media, accessibility and standards compliance.

And having worked closely with Jack on this and several other projects, we can attest to his skills and recommend him to others.  In fact just before UKGovOSS went live , he rectified - with lightning speed - an issue caused by an browser update which would have prevented us from launching the site.

Thanks again Jack for all your help!

Visit his website (his blog is also a great read) and follow him on Twitter at @thepickards.

Jack’s profile on UKGovOSS.org

A warm welcome if you’ve just joined us!

One of the features of UKGovOSS is that members can create and manage their own special interest groups, with their own dedicated forum and group wire. 

And we’re really pleased to see our first three groups have been founded.  Say hi to Ubuntu UK (founder: Alan Pope), Open Source Security and Governance (founder: Richard Morrell) and new in today, the Open Data group, run by Joss Winn.  Please check out the groups.

Seeking Moderators!

We’re also inviting members to become moderators for the other UKGovOSS groups. We’re looking to have at least one moderator for each of the following:

• Open Source CMS for Government
• Open Standards
• OSS Supplier Forum

We’d like moderators to take an active part in their group and encourage positive interaction and discussion between members.  So if this interests you, please ping me a private message or an email (ian.cuddy@publicsectorforums.co.uk) Many thanks.

To mark the launch of UKGovOSS, today we’re publishing our new report looking at the state of open source software activity in local government.

Open or Closed? is based on research we carried out late last year to examine the adoption, perceptions and experiences of open source in councils across the UK.  Our thanks to the 168 local authority managers and staff who took part.

Some headlines from the survey:

• 64% believe their council needs to increase its use of open source software (27% agreeing strongly)
• Around half say their council will increase its open source use by 2011
• 370 local government open source deployments identified
• Software licensing costs represent 30-40% of some councils IT budgets
• Why do councils go open source? 75% put lower cost as #1 factor
• Office software is where open source will impact most in local government over the next three years
• 65% believe perceptions of open source being ‘too risky’ stops councils from using open source more widely.

That’s just a taster of the report, which has been kindly sponsored by Bull Information Systems and One Point Consulting.  We hope this report is useful and welcome your comments on our findings.

Download a PDF copy of Open or Closed? here (5.5MB) or learn more about the report.

If the download is slow, try one of the links below:

• Download point 2
• Download point 3

The UKGovOSS network is here to bring together all those involved in open source and open standards in the public sector.

Firstly, apologies to all that I’ve not been particularly active lately on the UKGovOSS website - it’s been a busy few months and my attentions have had to be elsewhere, but I’m now back in the saddle.

Over the last few weeks we’ve been pretty busy behind the scenes, working on the UKGovOSS platform, bug-testing and preparing new content.

 The community will be officially launched to the world later this week (Thursday 6 August), along with (finally!) the results of our survey on Open Source use in Local Government, which were previewed at our conference back in April.

So sorry again for the wait, we’re getting there.  Any feedback, comments, or suggestions you have are greatly appreciated. Many thanks.