On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 3:24 AM, Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me> wrote:
> Thank you for the summary. Excellent stuff! I'm not surprised in regards
> to the environment and the uphill battle. What you describe is relatively
> true for any Government I would imagine.
>
Yes, I wasn't surprised either, but I thought it would be good to
explain it for the benefit of people who haven't experienced this
first-hand.
Of course, this kind of thing happens in corporations too.
> So to change culture is a very difficult thing, and would require that we
> build a reward system top and bottom. Meaning, we could reward those quite
> publically when they use open source and free software and talk about the
> savings. I think we can figure out something.
>
Interesting that you talk about a reward system, because I talked to
both Nayak and Savant about this in the context of the Aadhaar
project[1]. The Aadhaar project by UIDAI is a country-wide identity
system with a unique number, biometrics, address, and so on (a bit
like the Social Security system in the US) that is being pushed
heavily by the government; particularly in the last year or so. It
propagated itself by being funded by the money that it saved in each
department by reducing wastage and fraud[2]. We talked about how such
a system would likely work even better in propagating open source
within government projects.
This is really interesting stuff.. I need to read up a bit about it. This is a little out there, but it seems that we could combine this with blockchains to provide some very interesting ways to do transactions. India is moving towards (for well or ill) a cashless society and this could be an interesting part of it.
However, the system would have to be formulated and managed very
carefully because openness in software cannot save you if your
software is mismanaged.
So I had a similar project when I worked at Intel where I had to get business units to conform to open source community norms, and to create a business process they can follow. I talked to a number of anthropologists on how to actually going about changing a culture. What made it easier for me was that business units were forced to use open source because use of open source was normalized and a standard practice so I was able to leverage that.
This is a much different and broader problem. It will likely require finding one department in each state that would be interested in recognition and then working with them to create one piece of high quality software to create a beachhead and then celebrating the successes they have. That's only one method, we'd have to employ others as well and create a perception that open source is inevitable.
sri
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aadhaar
2. https://medium.com/@jackerhack/a-rant-on-aadhaar-6213e002f064
Cheers,
Nirbheek
_______________________________________________
gnome-in-list mailing list
gnome-in-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-in-list
