In the US, one prime example is how students are assigned to schools within a city.
There’s constant disagreements about policy and the implementations are fairly pitiful. Opening school assignment apps, algorithms, and (anonymized) data as open source would let outsiders participate, tweak, and maybe even mash it into other Web services.

Skog

Debate No. 1: New Labour insist on furthering the interest of bio-tech companies despite the overwhelming majority of the public being opposed to ‘Frankenstein foods’.

Debate No. 2: Not so long ago nuclear power was seen by government as dangerous and uneconomic. Renewable energy was in vogue, if only as an aspiration. Now nuclear power has been positioned as the only means by which society can fill the impending energy gap, despite numerous studies still showing it to be dangerous and uneconomic.

In both debates those in the ascendancy (bio-tech and energy companies) are reviled by the public at large. They certainly are not seen as the safest pair of hands with which to bet our collective futures. The public are very much aware of the inherent dangers associated with the technologies they sell. Why then does the UK government insist on promoting them? Because they have money and power, much of which finds its origin in the US.

The same is true of Microsoft. Their technologies are a danger to the public good. Viruses, trojans, worms are almost exclusively a Microsoft problem. Exploitive licensing terms have actually robbed the public of their liberties. Why then has the UK government shaped public sector procurement to ensure Microsoft’s dominance? Its not because they can be trusted, but because they have the power and the money.

Yup, money is God.

The definition of an MP is somebody with an unfeasibly large house for their salary.

Whilst I appreciate this sentiment it is an outdated British stereotype - tea, crumpets and cucumber sandwiches.

The ‘Establishment’ is in decline and has been replaced by what Peter Oborn calls the ‘Political Class’ (The Triumph of the Political Class, 2007).

After 10 years of Blair, the emphasis is now less about aligning ones self with the established classes (i.e. the safest pair of hands) and more who’s got the most money and power, and how can I restructure society to further their interests.

To my mind, the UK public sector’s interaction with technology corporates reflects this more sinister sentiment.

Mark

However for all the procurement problems, I just don’t buy that open source is in a sad state of affairs when it comes to education. The procurement barriers certainly are sad, and when they are changed the market wil open up tremendously. But my point really is that I think Education is a fantastic case study where Open Source has disrupted a market *despite* major barriers in its way. There is a groundswell of support for OS in the education community, and it’s not just about Moodle - look at all the OS work being funded by JISC for example. Maybe not as high profile as Moodle but there is a major grass roots campaign taking place, growing strongly from the bottom up despite the major barriers to top-down procurement.

I guess that I just see a lot of really good things going on in the educational OS community in this country. While there are problems as you describe, I don’t think the orignal post gave a balanced view, there is loads of good work going on by OS developers and evangelists in the UK education community, and people need to know that the news is not all bad!

You are entirely correct about Moodle, including the 56% figure from the superb OSSWatch. This does not negate our point however.

Moodle’s outstanding success is *despite* BECTA - their closed-shop procurement frameworks do not specify a single Moodle vendor and even excludes Moodle itself. It is fine to buy a poor quality, bizarrely designed, semi-broken proprietary VLE from BECTA’s good friends RM, but you can’t, under the ‘procurement guidelines’, get the market leader!

The Moodle case illustrates *perfectly* just how far out of touch with reality BECTA are, and how unfair their guidelines are - it is the exception that proves the rule…

BECTA will, and do, claim that Schools, Grids for Learning and LAs are free to ignore the guidelines, but it is only in exceptional circumstances (like Moodle) that they will. We are also now seeing LAs procurement people *insisting* on organisations sticking to them! In an increasing number of cases this is leading to *existing* Open Source deployments being dismantled and support arrangements discontinued. All very good for lining the pockets of BECTA’s proprietary friends, but extremely bad news for Open Source companies working in the Public Sector.

The net result is *exactly* what UK Government/Public Sector IT looks like -

Corrupt
Overpriced (by Billions)
Broken
Falling behind the rest of the world

With you and me, the taxpayers, paying for it…

One of the key targets in UK educational ICT has been set by the Dept for Education and Skills, which dictates that by 2010 every school should have a learning platform. There is a major software procurement rush taking place right now as evidenced by the buzz at recent BETT and Learning Technology shows in London. Becta have a set of approved proprietary suppliers for learning platforms, however schools can choose thir own if they wish, and many schools and local education authorites have done just that. And many have chosen the open source route with a learning platform called Moodle. BESA run an annual UK schools technology survey which shows that in 2007 Moodle became the NUMBER ONE learning platform in secondary schools ahead of established players like Kaleidos and Learning Gateway, and third ranking in primary schools, just behind Digital Brain and MyGrid4Learning. Back in 2006 BESA also found that Moodle was installed in a whopping 56% of UK Further Education institutions. The Open University, the UK’s biggest distance learning platform by a long shot, migrated 180,000 students to a customised Moodle. Learndirect, a major government lifelong learning initiative, are also working on a customised Moodle. These numbers show that open source adoption in UK Education is hugely successful and that the learning platforms market has not only been disrupted by open source but that open source has overtaken the proprietary vendors to become THE dominant player. This is not a sad state of affairs, this is a world leading open source case study!