OSG Australasia
From OpenSourceGov
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New Zealand
The State Services Commission has provided two significant resources for agencies on the use of open source. The first a briefing to the in-coming Minister, which concluded:
- noted that open source software is generally a viable alternative to commercial software, and that it is increasingly used in both the private and public sectors globally;
- noted that 'value for money' and 'fitness for purpose' principles should continue to underlie any software procurement decision made by government agencies; and
- agreed that government agencies, when acquiring, upgrading or relicensing software, be encouraged to assess open source alternatives (where these exist) and should choose based on cost, functionality, interoperability, and security.
The second is a Guide to the Legal Issues in Using Open Source Software.
Work coming out of the Ministry of Justice as a Discussion Paper (PDF) has also provided valuable thinking on adoption of open source in government.
Use of open source in government is recognised in a category of the New Zealand Open Source Awards.
Management of elections
The systems used to manage the country's Electoral Roll are built on open source. This includes the databases (postgres), code behind (mostly perl), websites, call centre interfaces, firewalls and VPNs, security and network management, as well as around 100 desktops (Debian) used by the Electoral Enrolment Centre.
The vote-counting technology is also built on open source. Open source technology is behind many of the systems used to mount a General Election in New Zealand.
Infrastructure
State Services Commission uses a local open source web content management system Silverstripe to produce the National Broadband Map. The entire project has been released under a BSD license (http://beta.broadbandmap.govt.nz/source-code). The initiative aims to map supply and demand for broadband across the whole country.
New Zealand Post makes extensive use of RedHat servers and has achieved reduced operating costs and a smaller data centre footprint as a result.
Application development
The Ministry of Social Development uses open source in their application development environment, including the search engine Lucene (http://lucene.apache.org), the development platform Eclipse (http://eclipse.org), Maven the software project management toolset (http://maven.apache.org), Ant (http://ant.apache.org) and Subversion (http://subversion.itgris.org).
Pharmac publishes the Pharmaceutical Schedule which is distributed to over 9000 health professionals. The Schedule is compiled and typeset using open source in-house developed tools. The in-house system replaced one based on a proprietary product.
Radio New Zealand uses open source tools to handle text and audio publishing on their website. Open source is also used for their music library, contacts and programmes database, as well as their intranet wiki.
New Zealand open source projects in use within government
OpenWolf (http://validator.org.nz) is a New Zealand open source project that validates government websites against a set of government standards published by the State Services Commission.
Docvert (http://docvert.org) is a New Zealand led open source project that converts office documents to standards compliant web pages. It is used by a number of New Zealand government agencies
The National Library of New Zealand and the British Library developed the Web Curator Tool (http://webcurator.sf.net/) to harvest online documents. National Library also developed a Metadata Extraction tool which is available under an open source license (http://meta-extractor.sourceforge.net/).
The National Library makes extensive use of open source applications, including JSPWiki, Greenstone, Lucene and PKP Harvester, as well as in infrastructure (Tomcat and JBoss) and development (Java/PHP/Perl/Cocoon/Hibernate/subversion/Trac).
Web content management
Some years ago several government departments adopted Plone (http://plone.org) as their web content management system for public-facing and intranet sites. The agencies include the Treasury, State Services Commission, National Library of New Zealand, Ministry of Womens Affairs, Office of the Auditor General, the Electricity Commission and the Companies Office. Notably, development work commissioned by one agency was able to be reused by another smaller agency reducing costs for the latter.
Archives New Zealand is using Drupal (http://drupal.org) to present New Zealand War Art Online. Similarly the Ministry of Culture and Heritage uses Drupal for http://NZHistory.net.nz. The Retirement Commission uses Drupal for its high profile Sorted webiste (http://sorted.org). The Ministry for the Environment uses Drupal for the sustainability website (http://sustainability.govt.nz).
State Services Commission created a light-weight fit-for-purpose content management system for http://newzealand.govt.nz and released the code under the GPL.
E-learning
The Moodle learning management system (http://moodle.org) is used by a number of agencies including the Leadership Development Centre (http://ldc.govt.nz) which provides services to senior public service managers, Inland Revenue, Ministry of Social Development, Department of Internal Affairs and Department of Conservation.
The New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment (NZOSVLE) project was a significant national initiative to make Moodle-based e-learning available to numerous polytechnics and universities. The project, lead by the Open Polytechnic and funded by the Tertiary Education Commission, aimed to reduce the barriers to entry for smaller institutions and reduce the total cost of ownership for all participants. The project has enabled code to be contributed back to the core Moodle project and the local IT supplier to grow export services around large-scale Moodle clusters.
Local and Regional government
Grow Otago, an initiative to make climate information available for anyone interested in agriculture, etc in Otago, New Zealand. Uses UMN Mapserver & FOSS tools.
