It’s been running for a bit now, but the Knight Foundation has just issued another call for ideas to be submitted to win funding from a pool of up to $5 million.
It’s always the way with these funding things here at Delib towers, calls come in, and we try to think of something truly new, genuinely never thought of before, before ending up using those ideas with clients rather than submitting them for funding. There’s something about testing things in a real world environment, rather than on a pilot basis, that you just can’t beat if you want something to work.
That said, there’s one great element of the Knight Foundation call that once again we’d do well to copy over here. Anything produced through the funding has to be open sourced, so the public can benefit from it. That doesn’t mean the inventor can’t benefit as well, but it does mean that if the project comes to an end, what was paid for is not lost.
It’s not an understatement to say that the UK e-Democracy world would be a significantly different place if that principle had been applied to government funded pilots from the start, both UK and European.
So, we’re probably not going to be doing it this time, but if you fancy a stab at getting some funding to build something that may grow into something bigger with a global community, then there’s more info on the Knight Challenge here.
Government can’t really justify building a private empire with public money but I have seen it done.
In my experience the problem tends to stem from the perception that ‘open source’ is easily adopted or adapted – when it can be built as impossible to implement (e.g. no documentation, source code not available for download etc).
Some examples of eDemocracy O/S? VOICE (www.e-voice.org.uk) is based on DotCommunity O/S – Public-i ePetitions is O/S, TID+ (http://tidplus.net/project/).
Contrary to belief a large number of public funded eDemocracy technology has been “open sourced”, just not as we know it ‘captain.
If it’s not got source code for download or documentation around it then it’s pretty hard to call it open sourced really. Sure, things can be open sourced in a heath robinson manner to stop people using it, but again, hardly in the spirit of things.
Not sure a lot of public funded e-democracy has been open sourced, can’t think of anything from the national project that was, campaign creator following on from that wasn’t, etc, etc.
Depends what you mean by open source i guess!