[Sussex] E-GOVERNMENT BULLETIN ISSUE 158, 02 April 2004. (Fragment)

[Phil Slade]

 NATIONAL PROJECTS BID FOR SUSTAINABILITY.

The government is to rely on the emergence of collaborative, open
source software development communities with public and private
sector members to sustain the various software products of the national
projects for local e-government, one project chair said this week.

The Local Authority Websites (LAWs) national project
(http://www.laws-project.org.uk) announced this week that, a year on
from its launch, it has created several major pieces of free software for
councils. These include the free open source content management
system APLAWS+; the LGOL-Net 'middleware' solution to help
councils exchange information between a wide range of other systems;
and web-based self-publishing tools for community groups.

In common with many other of the national projects, LAWs was due to
conclude this month. Peter Blair from the project's sponsoring agency
the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister said his department would
continue to provide further, lower levels of funding for LAWs and
other completed national projects in 2004-05 and 2005-06 to help them
make the transition to a sustainable funding model. But beyond this
period other funding sources would have to be sought.

LAWs programme director Roland Mezulis told E-Government
Bulletin that plans for the free software solutions APLAWS+ and
LGOL-Net included putting all its code into an open source
community, in the hope that private companies would help fund such a
community with a view to making money from secondary services
such as consultancy, training and implementation.

"There are no guarantees it will all keep going, but [council users] have
a vested interest in maintaining it," he said. His own council, West
Sussex, would help kick-start the process but he acknowledged that it
would be problematic for smaller district councils to commit
significant subscription or other resources to development
communities.

Asked if commercial software companies were concerned about the
development of free packages by LAWS, he said: "There is no real
reason why they should feel threatened. We simply hope to raise the
floor with decent free software, pushing the commercial sector to raise
their game and raising councils' expectations as well - these are the
unwritten outcomes of the projects."

In a week of frenzied activity across around a dozen other early-
finishing national projects, the Planning and Regulatory Services
Online project (PARSOL - http://www.parsol.gov.uk) published a
comprehensive review of best practice in ICT in planning and
regulatory services; and the Local e-Government Standards Body
(http://www.localegov-standards.gov.uk) launched Custodian, an
online database of key e-government information and case studies
partly gathered from all of the national projects.

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