Arjen's blog

Parliament's questions to the Court of Audit

Preamble
The Lower House of the Dutch Parliament has asked the Court of Audit to investigate the problems and opportunities related to the adoption of open standards and open source software for the government's information systems. The Court has opened a LinkedIn group to collect opinions from experts. This blog post is my contribution.

The questions are being asked to the highest supervisory body of the country, rather than the departments responsible for implementing this policy - the Ministries of Home Affairs, and also Economic Affairs, Agriculture & Innovation - eight years after the government's first unanimous vote on this issue and the expenditure of about 5 billion euros on licensing fees. The impression given to the outside world is that Parliament is not impressed with the progress of the last eight years and believes that the relevant government departments could benefit from the external scrutiny of a neutral and objective body.

Each of the following five questions implies a series of unspoken assumptions. In order to answer the questions, it is necessary to identify and, where neccesary, challenge these underlying assumptions in order to reach a sensible answer.

The five questions
Here are the answers to the questions raised by Parliament. There is so much interdependence that subsequent responses will sometimes refer back to earlier parts.

“You cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it”

1.What possibilities and scenarios exist for the reduction of closed standards and the introduction of open source software by the central government (ministries and related agencies) and local authorities?

The Netherlands is a modern western country and has the same access to knowledge, skills, technology and comparable budgets for IT as Germany, France, Spain and Finland. It is a fact that all these countries have already implemented large-scale adoptions of open source and open standards in government. The implementation requirements of the Dutch government are also very similar to these countries. The reason that The Netherlands has not moved further in this area, eight years after the original, unanimous Parliamentary vote, can therefore be attributed to nothing more than the administrative culture and our Atlanticist political orientation.

There is no fundamental reason why the achievements of these other countries cannot be replicated in The Netherlands, especially as the  groundwork has already been done. Barriers to migration have often been treated as immutable laws of nature rather than just a problem to be solved.

• Parliament should no longer accept that a high dependence on one supplier is an adequate excuse not to move away from that very dependency (as the Cabinet did in response to parliamentary questions in 2004 and 2006 and 2008). The dependency itself is the problem that must be addressed, not an enshrined principle that IT departments must endure.
• Parliament should no longer accept that the acknowledged lack of technical or organisational knowledge amongst the 60,000 government IT professionals (and their suppliers) is an excuse for the lack of progress. It is implausible that the Dutch government is incapable of replicating the successful work of its European counterparts. Any governmental IT or management staff who do not have the requisite skills to carry out the very reasonable requests of Parliament should be replaced or retrained. Incompetence is grounds for dismissal, certainly not an excuse for refusal to do the necessary work.
• Intrinsic motivation works better than coercion. Administrators and IT staff who understand the wishes of Parliament can embrace it with real conviction and are likely to want to produce better results than those who only work under duress.  Such an approach will select and promote suitable people to the right jobs. The staff whose policies and  behaviour have caused our current problems are probably not going to the ones who find the necessary solutions.
• The link between HR and remuneration policies for IT professionals and achieving technical certification related to proprietary software from a handful of suppliers must be completely severed.

“When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”

2. What part of closed standards and software can be replaced by open standards and open source solutions and what cannot?

This question has yet another unspoken assumption: that central government has a realistic oversight of all systems, applications and related standards. As a result, questions about the number of systems that can be replaced are very hard to answer and have little relevance to achieving lower costs and greater independence in the foreseeable future – primarily because of the very large differences in costs that are associated with different standards. The government would do well to focus on the most common, generic issues, for which proven alternatives already exist. The original 2002 Vendrik Parliamentary motion already asked for this.

Key points to identify: what are the most expensive closed source areas where functional open source alternatives already exist and are already being used successfully elsewhere? What are the closest functioning areas that can result in successful migrations?

Migration plans should be drawn up in these areas as a matter of high priority – and this means halting or delaying other projects that may block these migrations and accelerating projects that play a supporting role.

For instance, in 2005 the former Ministry of Economic Affairs produced a document management system which has made it virtually impossible for years for the Ministry to use other web browsers, word processors or desktop operating systems. This is particularly surprising as, in 2004, the government itself announced that such closed systems in the work environement were harmful and undesirable, and were therefore going to be actively addressed as per the wishes of Parliament.

A current, concrete example within national government is the introduction of SharePoint. There is a significant risk that this investment, once made, will be (ab)used yet again as an excuse not to migrate to open and available alternatives. That would take us up to 2016 (14 years after the initial Parliamentary decision!) before any real work could begin on migration.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

3.What are the current costs? What are the predicted up-front and structural costs costs of moving from closed standards and the introduction of open source software? What are the projected savings?

The Dutch government currently spends about one billion Euros on proprietary software licences annually.  These licences are mainly foreign, and the income tax and VAT on this expenditure flows into the Irish exchequer, because most European branches of American software companies are based there. The total Dutch expenditure is eight times more. Both governmental and general expenses grow by about 10% per annum and are therefore unsustainable.

A significant portion of these annual costs can be saved or ploughed back into the local economy through Dutch SMEs, and so this cost will be an investment in the Dutch knowledge economy. With the government as the leading customer in this new market structure, it is feasible that The Netherlands could save billions per year.

In addition to these direct costs, various indirect savings could increase this amount many times over: the costs of management and security for vulnerable mono-cultures; the cost of merging old legacy systems and new applications; and social costs caused by security failures and easily avoidable software security problems. Every month there are Dutch hospitals whose primary processes are severely disrupted by computer viruses - a direct result of monoculture.

Moving beyond the financial, it becomes more difficult to quantify the social impact of the high dependency level of Dutch society on certain foreign, privately-owned companies.  However, if more than 80% of the PCs in The Netherlands can be remotely controlled or even switched off, what does that say about Dutch national sovereignty? Is it politically acceptable for foreign software suppliers or government bodies to have an On/Off switch for ministries, municipalities, police, hospitals, water works, supermarkets, schools etc...?

“The best moment to plant a tree is 25 years ago, the next best moment is now.”

4.How would the reduction of closed standards and the introduction of open source software be realised?

With not only the right mandate (which Parliament actually voted for eight years ago!), but also the right expertise significant results are attainable within 24-36 months. This requires making this area a priority issue and a break from the old attitudes, excuses and methodologies of recent years (see answer to question 1). Successes abroad can serve as templates for our projects.

One area where we could make a rapid start would be primary education. Currently we are actively strengthening existing monopolies via this sector with public money. If by 2011/12 the first two years of primary school use open systems and then a higher class is switched each year, The Netherlands will have the first generation of citizens who are trained in vendor-neutral systems entering the workforce in 12 years, easily capable of working with multiple systems and applications. De 'Rosa Boekdrukker' primary school in Amsterdam clearly shows how this can be done.

Dutch hospitals in The Netherlands could follow the example of the Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein.  Many other hospitals can share in this success.   And because it's already been shown to work, the risks and costs for the next 100 hospitals are much lower.

It will take at least a decade before the full potential of open source and open standards can be utilised.

“Go out on the limb, that's where the fruit is”

5. Beyond the cost, what other advantages, disadvantages, risks and opportunities should the Court of Audit factor in? What conditions must be met to make possible the implementation of open standards and open source software?

Benefits & Opportunities

• Savings of billions per year in direct costs for all citizens and IT-using organisations in The Netherlands.
• Redirecting a stream of funds from Ireland / USA into Dutch society as a huge and permanent investment in our knowledge economy.
• Government investment in software will result in free, reusable software and knowledge available to our whole society, rather than controlled by privately-owned and usually foreign companies.
• Security is strengthened through greater diversity of IT, competition, and the possibility of custom code audits.
• National sovereignty is reinforced when the government has complete control over its systems.
• General IT competence will dramatically improve, ensuring fewer spectacular and expensive failures such as the 2006 'Walvis' Tax project, national medical records, public transit chip cards and, most recently, the new police system to name but a few.

Disadvantages and risks

• The current, fragmented IT policy of the Dutch government means that a thousand little fiefdoms may need to be broken up.
• The apparent lack of skills amongst IT management may have consequences for personnel. No doubt there will be resistance.
• Significant investment is probably needed in re-training government IT professionals.
• Angry phone calls from Washington DC when the flow of licensing money is shut off.

Preconditions

• See answers to question 1.
• Be realistic about the positioning and motivation of software companies. Companies seek to maximise profits, control markets and will therefore exploit any leeway that the government offers them. We do not invite the turkey to discuss the Christmas dinner. Therefore why do we accept “advice” from software companies and their interest groups about the best software strategy?
• We need to break away from the idea that  extensive outsourcing is necessary, effective or desirable. The raison d'etre of government is to justly serve the legitimate needs of its citizens; it should therefore have detailed and inherent control over information systems. Stop the corporate-speak and 'playing business' by civil servants. Government is not a business, nor should it pretend to be. Outsourcing the control of information processing systems is contrary to the very principles of a democratic state for exactly the same reasons that outsourcing the military forces or the judiciary would be.
• Make a clear distinction between political and administrative goals and the means of achieving them. Cutting costs can be realised in many ways, regaining national sovereignty in only one.
• As long as desktop projects implemented under the guise of “efficiency through economy-of-scale” result in each desktop costing 6600,- Euros per annum, this kind of bullshit-bingo is completely risible. Keep IT managers and other decision makers who don't know the difference between desktop-standards and a "standard-desktop" away from such projects.

Cloud computing, from the frying pan into the fire

In a recent column (Dutch), Frank Benneker of Amsterdam University explored the consequences of the rapidly growing use of cloud computing. The shift of computer applications from PCs and servers to a single "service" provided through a worldwide network is probably as fundamental a shift as the earlier one from mainframe computing to PCs.

Given the objectives of the Dutch Open standards and interoperability policy plan, cloud computing seems the quick and easy-to-implement solution: I hear Web 2.0 enthusiasts say “put everything on Google Docs and we are all interoperable”. But just as in the case of the "liberation" of PCs from mainframe managers/suppliers, there are problems with cloud computing – potential snakes in the grass.

In December 2004 the Dutch government decided that the dependency on dominant software providers was a problem and had to be addressed. The Dutch action plan from 2007 was the first, tentative step in dealing with this.

The Dutch government wants to use open standards for interoperability, and open source to foster independence, lower costs and strengthen local development (services instead of licences). Open standards are fundamentally essential for interoperability. The Dutch 'standard' government desktop plan demonstrates to governments that interoperability can also be achieved with an imposed, top-down mono-culture. Give everyone the same software, and information can be conveniently exchanged.

However, the price of a mono-culture is high, both directly in money and in less quantifiable aspects such as security problems and an extreme dependence on a few foreign private companies. The latter is especially difficult to reconcile with the idea of a sovereign nation and a government that is democratically accountable. Surely our governments would wish to avoid relying on foreign companies to control the connectivity of our information databases in some nebulous “computer cloud”?

The crucial point is that even in this cloud, the hardware does not belong to the government nor is it possibly even on Dutch soil. The hardware can be located anywhere in the world, and therefore subject to multiple legal regimes beyond the Dutch government's control (or indeed, accountability).

Much of the Web 2.0 knowledge for the Dutch government and discussions about this are held on ning.com servers, and the consensus is that it would be pretty difficult to migrate away from there. Even NOiV, the Dutch open standards and opensource implementation bureau also holds regular discussions on LinkedIn instead of its own XWiki environment. It is only natural that people use what they know. However, bearing in mind not only the objectives of the Policy Document, but also the various Parliamentary Motions on the subject and the earlier decisions of the government itself, cloud computing is a major IT problem. To expect cloud computing to rid us of the issue of  “lock-in” that has been a problem for the last 20 years creates a classic example of 'out of the frying pan; into the fire '.

Our current problems arise from not foreseeing the long-term consequences of our IT choices. We need a separate government IT programme to ensure the freedom of choice that we see as entirely natural in other markets. Unless the cloud computing servers are on Dutch soil and we have access to the code under an open source licence, we shall only go from bad to worse.

The Free Software Foundation has the solution for these problems, a distributed cloud that we can all access. Servers that provide free software designed to guarantee our digital freedom. After all, this is the original intention of the Internet: all equal players in their own cloud.

Carribean opensource

It's been quiet on this blog. A long vacation that was not really a vacation, more on that later.

Last week I was visiting the Dutch Caribbean by invitation of the local government to do the opening keynote (ODF 1 2) on their conference on open standards and opensource. Curacao, one of the islands of the Dutch Antillies is about to become fully independent nation state and that means a lot of re-design of the local IT systems of the government and public sector. The government is determined to maximise the opportunities offered by open standards and opensource software to move the new governemnt, the local educational system and economy forward. For education an OLPC project is being considered because 3 PCs per school is not the way into the 21st century. Hopefully the new Internet Exchange (based on the Dutch one) will bring down the cost of bandwith so that all those OLPC's will be able to go online.

All of this will not be easy to achieve. Curacao is a very small entity to function as an independent nation and do everything themselves. There is a great need for expert knowledge and training to bring local IT-staff and administrators up to speed and the available budgets for this are very limited.Curacao spends about 20 million pounds per year on proprietary software licenses (mostly in government and other public sector), this amounts to about half a month's wages per citizen. If this can be reduced by 30-50% the budget required to make the desired changes is available (assuming the total IT-budgets can be kept at the same level for the time being).

Because this visit also included several meetings with local dignitaries and media appearances I was invited to stay for a whole week in a beautiful apartment west of Willemstad. Many thanks to Ace Suares who has been working for open-IT on his island for many years. He was the driving force behind the whole conference and a wonderful host.

The Last HOPE

Just finished my talk at the Hope conference about the national Dutch open standards / opensource policyplan. Hope stands for Hackers On Planet Earth and has been a bi-annual event since 1994. HOPE features presentations on a range of (IT) security related topics but also hosts all kinds of techno-creative workshops and lectures on the social relevance of technology. For a full listing see the conference site. Video's of the talks will become available in the future.

Because the mid-town Manhattan hotel just across from Penn station in New York may be demolished next year it is unclear if there will be (a) hope after this one. Because of this, and a certain facination with morbid themes, the conference organisers are calling this 'The Last Hope', refering both to their conference and the state of (digital) civil liberties in the US.

Cnet has the first coverage on the event.

My slides are here in ODF and PDF. For more background links and video see the 24C3 page (Dec 2007 talk in Berlin) and my blogpost about LinuxTag (May 2008 Berlin).

LinuxTag presentation

On Saturday May 31st Gendo presented its experience on changing national policy on open standards and opensource at LinuxTag 2008. The link to the talk description is here and the slides are here in ODF and PDF. LinuxTag is Europe's largest opensource conference with over 11.000 participants from 31 countries. Doing a talk there was a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to next year.

Linux Magazine Germany has a writeup of the talk here. The presentation was not recorded but an earlier (similar) presentation was taped last december at the CCC congess, also in Berlin.

Conservatives want opensource

Conservative party leader David Cameron held a speech at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts on April 3rd. Aside from the usual criticism (not all undeserved) at the current government he talked about the network society and bottom-up collaboration enable by ubiquitous access to IT. He (or his staffer) had obviously read "Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win" by William C. Taylor and Polly G. Labarre. And a good thing too since it is filled with good examples of how to innovate by sticking your neck out and doing things differently.

About three quarters through the speech Cameron very explicitly stated that his government, if elected, would actively seek a greater use of opensource software and mandate the use of open standards for public IT systems. According to him this will enable faster innovation in the public sector while avoiding repeats of the very expensive NHS disaster.

When things like this are being stated by a conservative the idea has arrived. The other political parties will have to follow suit or be left in the dust by the conservatives. I think these are really good ideas and I know they are practical because I advised the Dutch government on a policy plan (full English translation here) last year that was adopted by parliament last year and is being implemented now. Since the publication of the plan that has been a remarkable change in the relationships between many government institutions and their usual software suppliers. They customer is re-taking power by forming interest groups and re-defining what IT-vendors should actually deliver (instead of just waiting what vendors want to sell them). Norway has a comparable policy and France, Germany Italy and Spain are taking concrete steps too. Below an example of the effects such a policy has had on the quality of healthcare and education in the south of Spain:

More about my work on open standards and opensource here.

A tale of two elections

There were two elections on my news radar the last two weeks. One in an African country now rapidly sinking into an economic crash and possible civil war, the other in the heart of the civilized west; the OOXML election by ISO standards body in Geneva. Aside from the locations and prices of hotels for journalists the differences were few. Bribery, fraud and intimidation were applied to achieve a specific outcome, never mind what the majority wanted. In the OOXML election even the standards organizations of proper democratic countries like Norway and Germany were unable to withstand the well-oiled lobby machine of the worlds most convicted software monopolist. In the Netherlands Microsoft was actually a member of the committee and prevented a committee consensus. So instead of voting against the standards, as 21 out of 22 members wanted, the Netherlands voted 'abstain'. The list of irregularities is endless but try some of the links above to get an idea.

To quote an ISO insider: "“OOXML’s BRM process is irretrievably broken; complete, utter, unadulterated bullshit”" (Tim Bray). The ISO process is dead and that is bad. Even though ISO was far from perfect it's open process did help many nations to agree on thousands of standards on anything from steel manufacturing to surgical gloves. These kinds of standards are crucial for a globalized high tech society.

It would seem that those in favor of the OOXML standard (Microsoft and a few of it's partners) did not have so much confidence that their 6000-page specification would make it to ISO standard status that they trusted a transparent en democratic process to take it's course. There way of treating the process was much like an African dictator with a chest full of medals. Utterly lacking in legitimacy but high on power as a consequence of an unlimited bribery budget and a willingness to bully anyone in the way of their goal. If they were not so much trouble you'd almost feel sorry for them.

Microsoft is of the opinion that everything went fine. Neelie Kroes and the EU have a different view of the matter. I feel another mega-fine around the corner. Not that any of this matters a lot to the fastest growing parts of the world. Brazil, China, India, Iran voted no. They represent a big chunk of the global population (as opposed to yes-voters such as Malta). If I were an applications vendor I'd make sure I stay ODF compatible. Several countries such as the Netherlands and Norway (that is now appealing their stolen vote) have already formally chosen ODF as the document standards for government. Others are looking to follow this lead. It's not entirely clear what Microsoft has achieved by gaining the ISO label. The governments that already choose ODF are not going back and Microsofts well documented behavior is not going to make then many new friends.

The EU appear to have been investigating the OOXML ISO certification process for some time now. Documentation from countries with where very clear breaches of protocol occured will strengthen the case for further antitrust investigations and possible additional fines or other measures. The victory of OOXML may turn out to be very costly indeed. And any credibility of OOXML as an 'open' standard has already been severely damaged by the deluge of reports about bribes, fraud and other forms of misconduct by Microsoft over the last year. A Pyhrric victory if here ever was one.

Desktop mono-culture for the Dutch

The Dutch national government is proceeding with its new implementation of 'GOUD' (Gold), its new plan for a 'standardized desktop' for ministries and other governmental institutions. After the much publicized new Dutch National IT-policy of last autumn this might sound wonderful. It's not.

The problem with the 'standardized desktop' is that it uses very few real standards. Instead it uses products and pretends they are standards. The difference between 'standards' and the idea of 'standards products' is widely misunderstood, often confused and this is where projects such as 'GOUD' go off in troublesome directions.

Standards are things like Open Document Format, HTML (the programming language of web pages), LDAP (a protocol for defining access-control on a network) or TCP/IP (the low-level network protocol of the Internet). What all these things share is that they are not owned by a single entity. They are a formalized form of knowledge about how to achieve certain technical objectives. This knowledge can be used by programmers to build tools that actually do these things for us. This means that there will be many different, competing, implementations of the standards that can inter-operate. This diversity fosters a working market and ups the quality while lowering the price (often down to zero).

'Standard products' on the other hand are, by definition, products and generally owned by private corporations with a profit motive. Standardizing on a product is essentially creating a mono-culture of one type of product, making yourself totally dependent on the vendor of that product. In the case of desktop computers this is extra problematic because there exists a de facto monopoly in this market. Creating a mono-culture in a monopolized market actually re-enforces the monopoly, the exact opposite of the aims of the adopted policy plan.

The Dutch government (or any other for that matter) should not work towards a 'standard desktop' but towards open desktop standards. This is precisely what the Dutch parliament unanimously requested from the government in 2002. Open standards, such as the ones mentioned above, allow computers of many different types and the people using them to communicate.

The Internet is a network of billions of computing devices made by thousands of different vendors and these can all communicate through open standards. Because of this I can e-mail other people without having to know anything about the computer they use. As long as we all agree to adhere to the standards information sharing is possible with a variety of systems and products. Open standards make this possible and should be the cornerstone of any governmental IT-architecture.

I've had many conversations with civil servants on this issue over the years and I conclude from these that the vast majority of them have no conceptual understanding of the difference between (the use of) standards and product mono-culture. In 2005 I was speaking at the Ministry of the Interior to a civil servant who enthusiastically talked about the 'standard' desktop they were developing for the entire government (350.000 desktop in the Netherlands). When I asked him what standards they were using he responded with a list of products: 'this version of an operating system, that version of a word processor', and so on. I tried not to cry. I really did.

In the 'Gold'-documentation (yes, the project name is a gift to punsters) the same way of thinking is pervasive; in order to collaborate, all civil servants need to use the exact same software products. I call bullshit. One of the primary recommendations of a counter-expertise report was to replace product-specific standards by open standards. This would enable interoperability with a variety of systems in the future and thus free the government of its dependence on a single vendor. This remains one of the primary stated goals of the national policy set by the government and applauded by parliament.

I can imagine how 15 years of vendor-lock-in-by-standards would lead people to believe computer systems can only share data if they are all supplied by the same vendor. This is however not a law of nature but a symptom of a badly functioning market. It is a problem to be solved by making a policy plan and sticking to it. The national action plan obliges the government to actively seek solutions to the problems of interoperability by the mandatory use of open standards.

In a letter to parliament the responsible minister for the 'Gold' plan claims two things:

1. With the new 'standard' desktop civil servants will be able to collaborate better. It is not clear why they cannot collaborate now. Don't they all have e-mail and a phone? What 'collaboration' and 'better' means in this context is never defined so it's kind of hard to verify this claim.

2. By implementing a mono-culture of Gold PC's the cost of systems maintenance and administration will be reduced to a level that will compensate the cost of procuring and implementing them in the first place. Not that this claim requires a detailed understanding of the existing level of cost.

MPs I work with will be seeking freedom-of-information acces to all relevant documents pertaining to this project from 2006 onwards. I'm looking forward to being proven wrong but I'm not holding my breath.

7-year olds get school laptops... in Peru

Wouldn't it be great for education if all school kids had their own laptops? Well, in Peru this is happening. And in Uruguay, Mongolia, Libya and Ethiopia. The laptops are designed and developed by a non-profit foundation called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) started by Nicolas Negroponte, formerly of the MIT Medialab.

The OLPC is a technical miracle. It was in fact considered impossible by all the major commercial manufacturers and software builders like Intel, Dell, IBM and Microsoft. That did not hold back the OLPC team though and they build something not only affordable ($150-$180) but also rugged, maintainable and very, very eco-friendly. My Mac laptop eats 30-80 watts, the OLPC does 1-2 watt. That matters when your primary source of electricity is a $10 solar panel. If the world switched to OLPC's from their current systems the savings on power cost (even excluding the environmental cost!) would be sufficient to buy 50 million OLPC's per year for the third world.

On the software side the OLPC foundation chose to use open source software wherever possible, both to keep the cost to their clients as close to zero as possible but also to allow local communities to adapt the software to their needs, wishes, languages and cultural conventions. All the specifications of the laptop (both hard- and software are available for public scrutiny and improvement from the OLPC wiki. This guarantees the independence of nations basing their education on OLPC devices, they will remain in control over the content and methods of education because they have full control over the technology.

But the technical brilliance is not the most important part of the story. The way digital teaching aids allow for new ways of disseminating knowledge is. When every student has a networked digital device that can store and display digital information, schoolbooks can be fully digitized. That gives opportunities to free the ownership of the information in them from the classic model of big publishers that exert control over what goes in the books. A schoolbook is then just a part of a wiki-type system where teachers, experts and other interested parties can collaborate on educational materials that is then shared freely with the world. Some of these contributers may be financially rewarded for such work in the same way we now financially reward publishers. The output however would belong to all of us and we would not have to buy the same knowledge over and over again.I've written more about this here.

The interesting question for western countries is whether they will lag behind places like Peru and Mongolia in modern education. Western European countries typically spend 150-300 euros per child per year on schoolbooks so there's no question that the budget is there. It just needs to be spent slightly differently.

Much has been made of the fact that teachers would not be able to handle the technology. But teachers don't teach kids these laptops, they mostly teach each other. But don't take my word for it. Listen to the 9-year old expert:

Some interesting ideas from Robert X Cringley on the future of education if all kids have full access to online information resources. As often with these type of articles there are as many good ideas in the comments as in the article itself

Weekend in London

Easyjetted over to London on Friday after finishing my 'Train-the-Trainer' class. The students worked hard on writing responses to two articles in a Dutch E-zine on open source/open standards. While bored on the plane I added my own article (Dutch) to the discussion.

Now working on the Makewarshistory campaign website and talking to journalists on Monday about open source for governments, voting computers and the Mifare RFID hack. Trying to find some free time to spend doing as little as possible with my love Annie.