Every year, the geeks declare ‘Year of the Linux Desktop‘. So often, in fact, that’s it’s become a running gag. In fact, Apple has made in-roads, and Ubuntu is more popular than ever. Progress comes in small steps.
We actually may have taken a relatively large step this week: the new Obama adminstration has declared a very open information policy, and their IT structure shows promise in moving this same direction. While not running Apache and Red Hat yet, they’ve certainly adopted some open social interaction structures. It would be safe to say that the Obama administration is the best so far at “getting it“.
The missing element here, and the biggest specific step the US Government could make next would be to demand that all documentation be saved in an open format. Want proof that Microsoft still has a monopoly? Try sending someone your resume, proposal, or memo in something other than .DOC format. If the government simply declared that all archives and transactional documents must be saved in . The ODF is a deeply-flawed, but acceptable good start. Ultimately, I am not sure the document format will matter. Within the next 3 years, I bet that words and numbers and tables and figures and images are simply kept in the cloud. I know I am not the first one to say this– but I can hope that the government would take an active role in pushing documentation into the common external places. Cloud computing is not a technological hurdle, it’s a social acceptance problem. I still encounter many people that resist putting things “out there”. When pressed, there is no specific reason, other than people think the hard drive on their laptop is somehow safer than the huge servers tucked into concrete bunkers somewhere along the Columbia River.
I would hope that the transparency issue continues to gather steam. I would hope to see the day when the government simply insists that all documentation: project bids, meeting minutes, deliberations, and especially lobbyist efforts, get published in a format that is easily remixed, chewed up, and boiled around in ways that slightly scare the powers-that-be. We’ve seen a steady march forward with DARPA since the 60s and 70s, early gopher scientific info in the 80s, and then Thomas in the 90s, but the government certainly has dropped the ball in the last 5 years. If the government can resume its Jeffersonian role in pushing new things for the republic, and allowing the market to fill in where advantageous, then maybe someone’s next interaction with the government will force them into putting things out there for scrutiny (policy or code), and they’ll realize that privacy ultimately depends on open scrutiny, not secrecy.
No home wifi firewall will protect us from an opaque government.