LGAM Knowledge Base

For a few years now I have been getting more and more irritated that Councils seem to be paying big software companies large amounts of money for products that don't really deliver, and I have spent a fair bit of time recently trying to think of a solution to the problem. I have suggested before, that it would be fantastic if Councils could band together to develop an Open Source Local Government Software Suite, but I'm not sure how to make that happen.

There are a couple of possibilities. The South Australian Government is planning to set up an Open Technology Foundation which will be tasked with "helping governments make better, more cost effective, and more innovative use of open technologies, standards and methods in order to improve service delivery to citizens".

Also, It has been suggested to the Government 2.0 Taskforce, that it should set up a source code repository (GovForge) to help Australian government to develop open source applications. Hopefully, they might take the suggestion on board, and get something happening. Things are happening in this space elsewhere in the world. In Europe there is OSOR.EU, and in the USA there is the Civic Commons. Hopefully Australia might follow suit.

Another option might be a cloud computing based solution. I believe Amazon & Microsoft have cloud based database solutions, and even better I know that Google is planning to add hosted SQL databases to Google App Engine in the very near future.

Given that a lot of local government software is database related, I think there are real possibilities with this approach. Instead of paying programmers to develop their own software, Councils could pay them to build applications for a common cloud-based database. Even better, I for one have written a lot of Access queries and reports in the past, and I have dabbled a little in SQL as well, and I am sure there are a lot of other Local Government people out there that have done the same. If one or two people from every Council wrote a query or report or two the functionality of the system could be developed very quickly.

Chuck in a wiki to document how the system works, and you would have the makings of a system that could be both cheaper and better than anything currently available.

If anyone has any other suggestions on how to create better, cheaper software for local government, please leave them below, so we can start planning the revolution!