Our NGO has been working directly with LGUs for the past couple of years and we've also been trying to introduce the use of FOSS to improve their services. Here are some observations:
1) It's hard to generalize about "the nature" of LGU officials. There will always be "rotten apples," the ones looking for kickbacks and such, but at the same time, there are those that have their constituency's genuine interests at heart. As a strategy therefore, one needs to recognize the typologies of LGU leadership. We try to work with relatively "progressive mayors" -- the one's who believe in genuinely effective governance and participatory democracy. For this group, advocacting the use of FOSS can be founded on its principles of knowledge sharing. Cost-effectiveness and the other benefits of FOSS are secondary. Our principle is to work WITH them rather than treat them as merely clients or end-users. They should be part of the "development process" because they are in the best position to say what the application requirements are for effective governance ( its our job to translate it into specific technical solutions that address these concerns). This also enables the creation of a solid advocacy "base" which will have a stake in pushing for the adoption of FOSS because they are in effect "co-owners" of the software. Based on these "interactions", a core set of applications can be developed, which can then be offered and/or modified to another "type" of LGU official -- the ones who see themselves more as effective administrators and, as such, administrative effeciency for them is paramount. For this group, FOSS' main selling point is its cost effectiveness and flexibility. The main entry point is still at the individual LGU level either directly to the mayor or his staff and the nature of relations will tend to be contractual and professional. This group will tend to want off-the-shelf packaged solutions that "just work". As such, private sector involvment here is vital for support, customization and training. The worst type of politico will never particiapte in either process -- application co-development or off-the-shelf purchase -- because it's simply not in their interest to do so. If they do participate they expect personal monetary returns. Here you'll need to focus advocacy at the top layer -- either through legislative means (by mandating the use of FOSS) or through administrative means (by working with national government agencies such as the COA, NCC, DILG, or other organizations such as the Leauge of Mayors, Vice-Mayors, etc). Again, you'll be able to effectively push for the use of FOSS' if you have specific showcase projects that demonstrate its strengths. 2) Politics is politics. For most LGUs, the word of the local chief executive tends to hold sway.Of course, the sanggunian can always block measures. But these dynamics exists even in the private sector. I hold no illusions that private sector choices are based strictly on rational choices based on cost and effectiveness. Look at the tons of resources spend on marketing and product pushing -- some through legit means and some through less than desirable methods. Recognizing that there are these dynamics is an important step in cirumventing them to achieve the final goal. For LGUs, it may be via working with the local bureacracy -- the local treasurer, local assesor or accountant or working with concerned national government agencies or working with "impartial" NGOs. Also, consensus building is important. It's easy to label a computerization project as "politically motivtated" and/or benefiting a select group if the project proponent doesn't take the time out to educate and involve the relevant stakeholders. For most LGUs, we try to build a change-management team to facilitate this process. 3) For the past couple of months, I've been trying to build contacts with National Government agencies who are stakeholders with LGU computerization projects, namely the national computer center's field operation's office (ncc-foo) which handles the eLGU project and the commission on audit which handles the NGAs (national government accounting) project. I commend the work that NCC-FOO is doing but the feedback I've received from the ground is that they're still having difficulty fully deploying their three main applications (Property Tax Administration, Business Taxes, Accounting). Their work in the past has focused on building web-sites for LGUs and developing computer centers for interested partners. What worries me is that it's unclear whether the source code for the apps they're developing will be released as open-source. I think they outsourced the development to a third party developer. Why don't they consider adopting the distributed software development model, wherein you can have a set of full time developers (in-house or sub-contracted) and tap into the various volunteer groups (such as PLUG) or the general IT community for voluntary code contributions, bug-fixes, testing, etc (generally speaking, most open source projects are like this, where 70 to 90 percent of the code is written by a select core group). The NGAS project with the COA, on the other hand, was developed as a strictly closed source solution using MS-SQL server. I contacted the project developer to ask whether the system can be ported to other platforms (the SQL schema at least) so that other LGUs with limited resources can be given choices as to the back-end database. They refered me to a free MS product similar to SQL server but not access to the schema. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there's something wrong with the way governement is approaching its computerization projects. It's much too SOLUTIONS-oriented instead of SPECIFICATIONS-oriented. That is, goverment tends to focus on looking for products and solutions (via bidding) versus defining a set of criteria and standards that can be implemented in several ways. The NGAs and eLGU projects are examples, they are PRODUCTS but their specifications are not public knowledge even though they can be imlemented through several ways -- closed source vs. open source, windows vs. linux, java vs. C++, etc. etc. And don't even get me started on interoperability concerns and standard schemas for data definitions to ease the reporting and information requirements across and between government agencies. A specifcations and standards based approach would simply allow greater for greater choices, hopefully bolster the local software development industry and would allow a "peaceful co-existence" between contending technology advocates. Whew! This post is looong. Hope many of you had the patience to slog through it. We're currently working with one municipality in Antique to pilot and develop FOSS applications (very early alpha stage). We're planning to expand it to 10 municipalities if resources allow. Any help, comments and/or feedback is greatly appreciated. --> Igs _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
