Did you see the Grooveshark mascot on Turlington Plaza last week protesting DRM?

Update: Image added from the Alligator.

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We had elections for officers for the fall 2007 semester at our meeting on Monday. Our officers are:

• John Nile Li - President
• Jan Hendrik Grahl - Vice-President
• Mark Sisley - Treasurer
• Patrick Flanagan - Secretary
• Cain Norris - Public Relations Director

Congratulations to all our officers and a huge thanks to everyone who ran! Next semester will be awesome for Florida Free Culture.

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Recent news stories on proposals to extend trademark-like protections to company names and the names of musical acts.

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Anuradha Pandey, “Touch-screen voting machines must go,” op-ed, Independent Florida Alligator, April 3, 2007.

Those counties in Florida and around the country acquired touch-screen voting machines despite public outrage about the lack of accountability and the fact that they leave no paper trail. These election officials displayed a profound disregard for democracy. It should have been obvious to election supervisors that spending millions on machines that don’t leave a paper trail wouldn’t solve the problems from the 2000 elections.

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On Monday, April 16, I’ll be hosting a workshop on media ownership at 6 pm at the Civic Media Center (1021 W. University Ave.). The workshop is in preparation for the upcoming FCC hearing on the subject in Tampa on April 30. The goal is to get lots of thoughtful and passionate citizens down to Tampa for the hearing to have their say. For more information, visit StopBigMedia.com.

For more information, come to the meeting on April 16, or email me, grbaker@ufl.edu. There will be a carpool for those interested in attending the hearing.

Please spread the word widely about this meeting.

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Update 04-17: We have a follow-up post.

As mentioned in my earlier post about the Digital Divide Council, there is another issue under discussion in the capital that resulted from the demise of the State Technology Office. The subject is the way that state government manages IT, which had one legislator proposing that the state consider committing to open standards.

Background: The State Technology Office had been the primary IT unit in Florida’s state government since its creation in 2001, until it was de-funded by the 2005 Legislature in response to poor performance. At that time, the Legislature created an interim Enterprise Information Technology Services unit in the Department of Management Services to assume most of the old office’s responsibilities.

In the current session, there are bills proceeding through the Legislature to create a permanent Agency for Enterprise Information Technology within the Governor’s office.

Logistics: The Bills: In the Senate, the bill is SB 1974 by the Government Operations committee. The House Bill is HB 1557 by Rep. Will Weatherford (R-61). Neither the original nor the most recent amended version of SB 1974 are identical to HB 1557, so if the bills proceed, they will need to be amended somewhere down the road.

SB 1974 was introduced as a proposed committee bill as SB 7076. SB 7076 simply contained a statement of legislative intent with some basic principles for state IT management. The original version of SB 1974 was identical to SB 7076, but subsequent amendments have expanded the bill significantly, adding substantive provisions — most notably, establishing the Agency for Enterprise Information Technology.

SB 1974 was referred to the Government Operations and General Government Appropriations committees. On March 29, the Government Operations committee met to consider the bill and several amendments, and passed an amended version of the bill. Because the changes were so substantial, the amended bill may be re-referred to different committees. Once the new committee referrals are made, if those committees consider and approve SB 1974, it will proceed to the Senate floor for a vote by the full chamber.

HB 1557 contained substantive provisions in the original version, and the bill has not yet been amended subsequently. HB 1557 was referred to the Government Efficiency & Accountability Council and to the Policy & Budget Council. The Government Efficiency & Accountability Council referred the bill to its Committee on Audit & Performance, which passed the bill on March 21. If the bill is approved by the full Government Efficiency & Accountability Council and by the Policy & Budget Council, it will move to the floor for a vote by the full House.

If both the House and the Senate pass their respective bills, and the bills as passed are not identical, they will go to a conference committee to amend the bills so they have identical language. The amended bills would then return to their chambers for another vote; if the identical versions are approved by both houses, the bill will proceed to the Governor’s desk to be signed into law.

Provisions: These are long, complex bills, and unlike some of the other issues we’ve covered in this legislative session, there aren’t any news articles or advocacy groups to help contextualize the issue. So this is original coverage — and I haven’t read the full bills. Moreover, I can’t even identify the differences between the House and Senate versions — it’s hard to do a diff, because the chambers use different formatting.

However, as I said in the original paragraph of this article, the most interesting provisions of these bills relate to open standards.

Florida isn’t known as a leader when it comes to open standards. There are some references in law — “standards” is defined as follows:

“Standards” means the use of current, open, nonproprietary, or non-vendor-specific technologies.
§282.0041(10), Florida Statutes

But the definition is never put to good use. The closest the law comes is in the IT principles for the Agency for Workforce Innovation:

The design of workforce information systems should support technological flexibility for users without compromising system integration or data integrity, be based upon open standards, and use platform-independent technologies to the fullest extent possible.
§ 445.010(1)(g), Florida Statutes

Since the Agency’s Web site informs visitors that “This site works best with the most up-to-date version of Flash,” I’m not sure they’re doing too well on that principle. So that’s the current state of affairs.

Outside of Florida, there are copious examples of government entities deciding that their data should not be held hostage by any particular vendor. In the U.S., probably the best-known example is Massachusetts’ CIO’s ill-fated attempt to move toward the use of the OpenDocument format. At least two state legislatures, in Texas and Minnesota, are currently considering a standards mandate. Update: At least four other legislatures are considering the issue — add California and Oregon.

Have a look at the language being considered in Texas and Minnesota, then read the PCS of SB 1974 — in particular, page 34, line 28, through page 35, line 22. This is the version of the bill that the Senate’s Government Operations committee considered on March 29. Look familiar?

That’s right: for a time, the Senate bill contained identical language to the bills pending in the Texas and Minnesota legislatures. Section 30 of the bill would have required the Agency for Enterprise Information Technology to

develop a plan and a business case analysis for the creation, exchange, and maintenance of documents by state agencies in an open format

The plan and analysis would have been due by July 1, 2009. The section would also have required each state agency to

be able to receive electronic documents in an open, extensible markup language-based file format for office applications and may not change documents to a file format used by only one vendor.

The Agency for Enterprise Information Technology would also have been required to

develop rules for state agencies to follow in determining whether existing electronic documents must be converted to an open, extensible markup language-based file format.

Those stipulations are weaker than the proposals in Texas and Minnesota (although they define open standards the same way). To make a long story short: the section would have put Florida on a path to storing its documents in open formats.

This made me very curious where this language had come from. A call to the staff director of the Government Operations committee informed me that the language had been added at the request of Rep. Ed Homan (R-60) as a “trial balloon”. Rep. Homan had some interest in the issue, and since the Senate bill had progressed further than the House bill at that time, the language was added to the Senate bill to test the waters. (The staff director confirmed he had borrowed the language from the Texas bill.)

Well, the waters weren’t good: in the Government Operations hearing to consider the bill, Amendment 9 by Sen. Bill Posey (R-24) struck the language (see the vote history). So the standards language is absent from the bill approved by the committee (the Committee Substitute, or CS).

The standards language was never included in the House bill — which was approved by the House Committee on Audit & Performance, which Rep. Homan chairs. No amendments were offered in that hearing.

So where did this interest come from? Rep. Homan responded personally to an email by our erstwhile friend Eldo Varghese with a phone call, where he stated that he did not raise the issue at the urging of any advocacy group — he’s just a geek. Rep. Homan evinced an interest in continuing to explore the subject, perhaps by having the state’s universities conduct a study.

For his part, the staff director of the Government Operations committee suggested there was little interest among legislators to pursue the subject: neither in the authorization for the Agency for Enterprise Information Technology, nor in any bill.

There is a dark side to this story (other than that the language was killed), which is that there seems to be serious confusion about the difference between open standards (e.g. open file formats, open communications protocols) and free/open source software. Mandating that state agencies comply with open standards in the documents they create, of course, does not require the use of FOSS. Proprietary software, such as Microsoft Windows or Apple OS X, is more than capable of reading and writing in dozens of open file formats — for example, creating a PDF document in Adobe Acrobat, or reading an HTML Web page in Apple’s Safari browser (both are open formats).

According to Eldo, Rep. Homan displayed some of this confusion in their phone conversation. The staff analysis from the Senate’s Government Operations committee also exhibits this confusion:

[The bill] also authorizes the development of a plan for the use of open software that will permit agency implementation of no copyrighted software to improve the accessibility of citizens to agency documents and operations.

The bill’s “Private Sector Impact” is described as follows:

The theoretical promise that open software provides the ability to provide greater public access to government documents without the additional licensing expense by the using public or custodian agency.

The analysis continues:

The PCS also begins a planning process for open software. This will be a substantial undertaking and the bill sets no near-term expectations for this activity given its scope. “Open” software is the preferred term for the movement which originally described this product as “free.” Closed software is copyrighted source code which requires a licensing agreement and, customarily, the payment of royalties. In an “open” environment a base software product is allowed to be modified by its users such that it adapts to the organization in which it is embedded. The users are essentially co-developers and the refinement process is continuous and horizontal. The software developers act like a software stock exchange in which buyers and sellers, as co-developers, adapt the product to specific organizational circumstances. Errors can be fixed quickly because the scale of defect is limited to the using entity. Closed software is vertically developed and while its security solutions are powerful and penetration resistant, they can be vulnerable to the large enterprise scale of their global markets. The leading advocacy document for the open software movement is Eric Raymond’s 1999 essay The Cathedral & the Bazaar.

Even vertical developers of software have the ability of making documents open and this functionality can be directed by the procuring agency if it so desires as part of its licensing agreement.

(I bet that’s the first time ESR has been mentioned in the Florida legislature, but I digress.)

This confusion is troubling: legislators should have clear and accurate information about the issues they consider. As a supporter of open standards (as I outlined in my conference presentation last October), I’m disappointed at the fate of this language, but hopeful that with more information, legislators could choose to support at least a thorough study of the costs and benefits of adopting open standards for our state.

As a student of political science, this is all just fascinating to me.

I should note that the Legislature’s failure to mandate open standards would certainly not preclude their use. It seems clear that the Agency for Enterprise Information Technology would have the authority to make requirements in this direction, if they could be shown to comply with the statutory authorization for the agency — and I think they could be, especially given the existing (albeit weak) language on standards on the books.

Bonus: For some light reading, see this report prepared for the Senate last year of a comprehensive overview of the state’s enterprise IT. It clocks in at a cool 104 pages.

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Update: The game doesn’t start until 9:21 pm! That’s plenty of time to come to our awesome meeting beforehand! Go Gators

Our meeting Monday will be our last general meeting for the academic year. The meeting will take place at 6:30 pm on Monday, April 2 in the Johnson Lounge, Reitz Union room 121. Refreshments will be served.

We will have elections for our officers for the 2007-08 school year. All offices will be up for elections (i.e. President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary, Public Relations Director). Any student who has been to two meetings this year is eligible to vote. Similarly, anyone who’s been to two meetings this year is eligible to run for office (assuming you’re in good standing with the university). This meeting will count toward that requirement, so if you’ve been to a previous meeting this year, you’ll be eligible to vote and/or to run for office. If you have any questions, we’ll discuss them at the meeting.

After the elections, we’ll have a talk on Net neutrality by Dr. Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay, a professor in UF’s department of Decision and Information Sciences. Dr. Bandyopadhyay is the author of a recent study that concluded that abandoning Net neutrality would discourage ISPs from improving service.

For a summary of the research, see this UF news story. For more information on Net neutrality, visit SaveTheInternet.com. (FreeCulture.org is a member of the Save the Internet Coalition.)

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