Dare to be Open: A look at Open Government

Reporter: In an open world it makes sense to work openly by default; but what is working openly?

It is both simple and complex. Let's keep it simple. In short, it means opening up our products, sharing our non-sensitive information, opening our work to other teams, other organizations, to the whole world if it is profitable.

Why? Because there are many advantages. For example, you are free to reuse existing products, transform them, improve them and adapt them to your needs.

It's a kind of free exchange of information or a free flow of data. It is beneficial to collaborate as widely as possible, building on the expertise of others. Ok. Easy to say. But as a civil servant, how do I do that? What tools can I use to either share my work openly or learn from the work of others? GCdocs, for example, is an information management or storage tool that promotes collaboration. But is it open enough?

Guillaume Charest, open source software advisor at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat answers this question:

Guillaume Charest: If I need to work in the open, if I want to exchange through… have multiple people collaborating on the same document at the same time… well the way we have deployed GCdocs does not meet that need right now. So it's not a collaboration platform. Maybe the technology, that technology is Open Text behind GCdocs, could offer that capability but it's not at the moment so as such it's not meeting our needs in terms of public service.

If you're in to working together, you can use Microsoft Office 365, Google Docs. They offer capabilities of having people multiple people editing the same document together.

Reporter: Is it open standards would you say so?

Guillaume Charest: No that's not open standards. I would say it's a free solution. So there are free tools, free services, free open-source software. The difference is solution may be free the right you have only resides within the boundaries of what is provided to you.

So if you look at Google Docs that's awesome because you can work in the open but the technology on there it is proprietary so it's not open source. The document itself is open. You can all see it, you can all collaborate together and it meets the need of working in the open. That's totally fine.

It's not however meeting the digital standard of using open-source software and that's fine. There's gonna be points in time that you should most likely go with a closed source solution because that's what meets your needs and that's ok.

But you need to do the exercise of being good digital citizens and looking at what's available out there. I need to be able to collaborate. Well, cool, let's use Google Docs. Perfect.

Do you have any classified information in that collaboration? Yes? Well then don't. You can't do that because it's classified information. All unclassified? Good to go.

Follow the rules. The problem I think we had in the past is that we've had a lot of uncertainty around those rules and so as such we just said “you know what? I'm not gonna do anything” and that's that's the problem. We need to better understand our rules.

That's what we've been trying to do at Treasury Board recently. Trying to clarify those rules. Make sure yes, you can work in the open. You should be working in the open.

Why? Because you don't know everything and you got colleagues in other departments that have gone through the motions already. Leverage them.

And you know what? Citizens are willing to help you. Companies are interested in helping you as well.

So as long as you're working on unclassified material do it in the open.

Reporter: Interesting shift to be able to use at work the same tools we use in our private lives. Except of, course, when it comes to confidential information. Does this mean that so-called open source software is not secure?

Guillaume Charest: One of the myths that keeps coming back to us is like “open source software it's not secure.” Why is it not secure? “Because the code is open.” Ok. Well, there's a lot of different other things to consider.

The software you're going to be running. First it's gonna be in this specific environment. You'll have to… your security can't just be at this software level, has to be at the network level. It's multi-dimensional.

Reporter: Our IT and programmers are invited to adapt, use, and allow the use of these software or technologies known as open source. I understand the advantages. It’s overall cheaper. It’s inter-operable between our organizations and it's easier to update in response to technological changes.

That's fine but concretely on a daily basis as a non IT official I already use, and no doubt you too, these open source software to collaborate. Which ones? Well, the GC tools. They are all open source software. Last time I checked, more than 55,000 of us were using them. Not bad at all.

Guillaume Charest: I think that's part of our role civil servants. One of the thing that we have to understand is our needs and it's both our business needs but really our user needs. How do I, what do I need to be able to offer great services to our citizens. And sometimes it does mean being able to point to certain technology that's open there. So sometimes it's frustrating for us public servants because the technology we know is free. There's no cost associated to it. I don't need to have a contract in place. And yet IT still says no.

So we need to have dialogue. We need to understand where we can work together and see what other departments have done. And manage to go through the motion and say okay. So from a security assessment perspective they've done the work already and probably should be able to share it with other departments so that we at least have a part of the part of the assessment done. Even though our environments are totally different I totally understand the each department is different. At the end of the day there's a lot of the analysis that's standard for each one of them. So this working in the open again even though it's not to the public, sharing that analysis amongst ourselves would benefit each other so that we can accelerate the process. And so, what I would say at this point is, go for the low hanging fruits. Anything that you see could be replaced by an open source alternative that would benefit all departments. Work with your Enterprise architects. They're trying to find common pieces so that we can all benefit from this at your department scale but then explode that and make it available for the rest of the government at an enterprise level.

Reporter: What about you? What tools, free or not, do you use to better inform yourself or share practices in your field of expertise. We would very much like to read you in the comment box at the bottom of this page. By the way, we use free software to produce busrides.ca and trajetsenbus.ca. Yeah, yeah. We built our web page using WordPress - the most popular free software in the world to produce websites. It's also basically free of charge.

Reporter: In an open world it makes sense to work openly by default; but what is working openly?

It is both simple and complex. Let's keep it simple. In short, it means opening up our products, sharing our non-sensitive information, opening our work to other teams, other organizations, to the whole world if it is profitable.

Why? Because there are many advantages. For example, you are free to reuse existing products, transform them, improve them and adapt them to your needs.

It's a kind of free exchange of information or a free flow of data. It is beneficial to collaborate as widely as possible, building on the expertise of others. Ok. Easy to say. But as a civil servant, how do I do that? What tools can I use to either share my work openly or learn from the work of others? GCdocs, for example, is an information management or storage tool that promotes collaboration. But is it open enough?

Guillaume Charest, open source software advisor at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat answers this question:

Guillaume Charest: If I need to work in the open, if I want to exchange through… have multiple people collaborating on the same document at the same time… well the way we have deployed GCdocs does not meet that need right now. So it's not a collaboration platform. Maybe the technology, that technology is Open Text behind GCdocs, could offer that capability but it's not at the moment so as such it's not meeting our needs in terms of public service.

If you're in to working together, you can use Microsoft Office 365, Google Docs. They offer capabilities of having people multiple people editing the same document together.

Reporter: Is it open standards would you say so?

Guillaume Charest: No that's not open standards. I would say it's a free solution. So there are free tools, free services, free open-source software. The difference is solution may be free the right you have only resides within the boundaries of what is provided to you.

So if you look at Google Docs that's awesome because you can work in the open but the technology on there it is proprietary so it's not open source. The document itself is open. You can all see it, you can all collaborate together and it meets the need of working in the open. That's totally fine.

It's not however meeting the digital standard of using open-source software and that's fine. There's gonna be points in time that you should most likely go with a closed source solution because that's what meets your needs and that's ok.

But you need to do the exercise of being good digital citizens and looking at what's available out there. I need to be able to collaborate. Well, cool, let's use Google Docs. Perfect.

Do you have any classified information in that collaboration? Yes? Well then don't. You can't do that because it's classified information. All unclassified? Good to go.

Follow the rules. The problem I think we had in the past is that we've had a lot of uncertainty around those rules and so as such we just said “you know what? I'm not gonna do anything” and that's that's the problem. We need to better understand our rules.

That's what we've been trying to do at Treasury Board recently. Trying to clarify those rules. Make sure yes, you can work in the open. You should be working in the open.

Why? Because you don't know everything and you got colleagues in other departments that have gone through the motions already. Leverage them.

And you know what? Citizens are willing to help you. Companies are interested in helping you as well.

So as long as you're working on unclassified material do it in the open.

Reporter: Interesting shift to be able to use at work the same tools we use in our private lives. Except of, course, when it comes to confidential information. Does this mean that so-called open source software is not secure?

Guillaume Charest: One of the myths that keeps coming back to us is like “open source software it's not secure.” Why is it not secure? “Because the code is open.” Ok. Well, there's a lot of different other things to consider.

The software you're going to be running. First it's gonna be in this specific environment. You'll have to… your security can't just be at this software level, has to be at the network level. It's multi-dimensional.

Reporter: Our IT and programmers are invited to adapt, use, and allow the use of these software or technologies known as open source. I understand the advantages. It’s overall cheaper. It’s inter-operable between our organizations and it's easier to update in response to technological changes.

That's fine but concretely on a daily basis as a non IT official I already use, and no doubt you too, these open source software to collaborate. Which ones? Well, the GC tools. They are all open source software. Last time I checked, more than 55,000 of us were using them. Not bad at all.

Guillaume Charest: I think that's part of our role civil servants. One of the thing that we have to understand is our needs and it's both our business needs but really our user needs. How do I, what do I need to be able to offer great services to our citizens. And sometimes it does mean being able to point to certain technology that's open there. So sometimes it's frustrating for us public servants because the technology we know is free. There's no cost associated to it. I don't need to have a contract in place. And yet IT still says no.

So we need to have dialogue. We need to understand where we can work together and see what other departments have done. And manage to go through the motion and say okay. So from a security assessment perspective they've done the work already and probably should be able to share it with other departments so that we at least have a part of the part of the assessment done. Even though our environments are totally different I totally understand the each department is different. At the end of the day there's a lot of the analysis that's standard for each one of them. So this working in the open again even though it's not to the public, sharing that analysis amongst ourselves would benefit each other so that we can accelerate the process. And so, what I would say at this point is, go for the low hanging fruits. Anything that you see could be replaced by an open source alternative that would benefit all departments. Work with your Enterprise architects. They're trying to find common pieces so that we can all benefit from this at your department scale but then explode that and make it available for the rest of the government at an enterprise level.

Reporter: What about you? What tools, free or not, do you use to better inform yourself or share practices in your field of expertise. We would very much like to read you in the comment box at the bottom of this page. By the way, we use free software to produce busrides.ca and trajetsenbus.ca. Yeah, yeah. We built our web page using WordPress - the most popular free software in the world to produce websites. It's also basically free of charge.

Everyone in the room here, doesn’t matter if it’s Android or Apple that you’re using on your cell phone, is using open source software. When I’m walking home after work and listening to music, there’s open source libraries helping me stream that. When I’m opening an image on my phone, there’s an open standard for that image. When we’re using the Internet, the Internet would not exist if it wasn’t for open standards. So it’s fundamental to the way that we work.

For just getting into what is open source, open source software is where the source code is available to use, to modify, and redistribute. So that’s the fundamental concept and it’s community-based. You can report a bug on it, you can propose a change to it and it’s grass-root movements that really created open-source a while ago, and it’s the community keeps open-source going right now. The reason why open source is so important is that through the use of that community, we can start sharing, reusing.

People in the government of Canada are amazing problem solvers and they’re incredible researchers. But some of these problems have been solved before and so we don’t necessarily need to figure it out every single time.

Right now, our source code that we develop within federal departments, we tend to have that closed in, right. So my team will develop something really great and then another team on another floor, but from another department, will develop something really great that’s really similar.

Why would we go out and recreate solutions that already exist?

You’re also reusing all of the effort that’s gone into the design of that code, to the testing of that code, the quality. So the benefit is usually much greater than just the effort of writing that code.

In the UK, once we’d push the bar on making code open, we started pushing it further to say we should be coding in the open and we found it do things like increase the quality of people’s work. You know if you if you’ve got other people’s eyes on what you’re doing, you’re instinctively, from the beginning, making that better. It engages people more. We found it was a good recruitment tool. You know we’re trying to get the best people into government and this is what the best leading companies are doing. Why would we not be following that approach as well?

I mean, I think one of the big myths out there is that open source is not secure. It’s neither inherently secure or inherently insecure. It’s really more about the entire approach that you take.

So I think there’s a myth around open source, but maybe around technology and digital government as a whole, which makes me really angry at you, which is that the government can’t do this. You know we ask government, we don’t have the people to do this, we don’t have the skills and you know we better trust, it’s better that we, you know, we pay other people to look after this for us and we can transfer risk like that. And you can never, you can never outsource risk. If you’re in government, you might be contracting with anybody. If something goes wrong, you, as government, are still accountable and you absolutely should be, and that we do have the capability in government to do this. We can be very humble about our abilities, but there are hundreds of brilliant people across government doing really big, good, great things in this area and I think we should be really confident in our ability to take different approaches and think, okay, so it might have been traditional to do things one way in the past, but we can change, we have that capability, and we have that drive, and we’ve got no reason not to.

There can be a bit of a tendency to say, well we’re going to wait until Treasury Board tells us exactly how we should do this and then we’re going to follow that to the letter. There is this very, very active community out there that you’re probably all part of already. But if you’re not doing it on GCcollab and being part of those conversations, because that is full of people who are already doing this in the government of Canada. And the best way to learn how to do something is to go and talk to somebody who’s already done it.

But on top of that people that actually go out and do the work need the top cover, right. they need CIOs that say yes, go and use open source. CIOs that say let’s try and publish that. We need people who push the boundaries.

Living in the open, working in the open, is a very large culture shift. And open is so often anti or non intuitive to our teams. But once you make it, you start to see the advantages. You start to see that the world doesn’t fall apart when you make mistakes. The world actually gets better. You learn collectively.

And look at the ultimate goal. What are we trying to achieve? And that’s service to Canadians. To do that, we need to meet those expectations – that’s digital government – and then to get the digital government, we have to be more agile, and the tools to do that, come from open source.