Telling the story of using open source tools and methods for an open government policy consultation process while developing an open source licensing guide for government agencies

1. Name | Position
NZGOAL Software Extension:
Open sourcing the open source policy
Open Government Information and Data Programme

2. Introductions
Paul Stone Cam Findlay

3. Overview
Paul will cover:
NZGOAL framework
Why add software into the mix?
Why do things differently?
Policy outcome and result
Cam will cover:
Open source tools we used
Open sourcing public consultation
What’s in the policy?
Where we're at and what's next?

4. NZ Government Open Access and Licensing
(NZGOAL) Framework
Guidance to publicly funded agencies on how to apply
Creative Commons licences
to publicly funded
information, data and content.

5. NZGOAL Software Extension
Guidance to publicly funded agencies on how to apply
free and open source licences
to publicly funded
software development

6. Why?
Ensure consistent best practice
Potential for accelerated innovation
Efficient improvement to government digital services
Increase value from public investment in software

7. Walking the talk…
Open Source and Open Government
Image copyright of Animation Factory and reused according to terms of use

8. Some may see it more like this…
Image copyright of Animation Factory and reused according to terms of use

9. Walking Open Government
Image copyright of Animation Factory and reused according to terms of use

10. Walking Open Source
Image copyright of Animation Factory and reused according to terms of use

11. Public participation and policy revision
Robust discussion
Consensus building
Transparent changes to policy
Superior policy result

12. Name | Position
Open sourcing
policy creation

13. Open source tools
Loomio - Online consensus building discussion tool
GitHub - Social coding platform
Jekyll - Static website server and documentation generator
Atom - Used to edit the policy wording
Pandoc - Document conversion tool (command line)
LibreOffice - Final document editing and PDF generation

14. Open source as a process
Robust collaboration process used in practice
Code is computer instructions, policy is people instructions
Can we apply open source process to public policy writing?
Open Government Partnership & D5 Charter - transparency &
participation

15. Name | Position
Set time frame for
consultation
Calendar* by Dafne Cholet, CC-BY 2.0, https://www.flickr.com/photos/dafnecholet/5374200948

16. Name | Position
2-way dialogue with
participants

17. Name | Position
Decision making
and visible action
Dragon Con 2006 - Dice Wallpaper by Hillary, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://www.flickr.com/photos/lamenta3/2532597735

18. Policy co-creation

19. By the numbers
37 participants 16 topics 10 decisions
175 comments
28,000 words!
Designed by Freepik and distributed by Flaticon

20. In contrast
1 email submission
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21. What’s the 4 key policy sections?
Section 1 - Purpose, scope, definitions, licences
Section 2 - Legal and policy context
Section 3 - Policy principles
Section 4 - Review and release process

22. Some interesting policy points
Helps licence if an agency choses to open source
Adapted open source, use same licence (if possible)
Balanced GPL/MIT for new open source
Options for other licences
Suggests version control and existing repos for release
Contributions

23. Where we are at and what’s next?
Awaiting sign off
Once approved will be published for use on ict.govt.nz
Looking at further guidance notes to help agencies
We end up with a single framework (NZGOAL) covering
information, content, data and software

24. Name | Positiontwitter: @opendatanz
#opendataleadership #nzgoal
opendata@linz.govt.nz
Questions?