News

Victoria State Emergency Service goes live with Plone

vchoy — 2012-04-18T07:40:00Z

The Victoria State Emergency Services (VICSES), a volunteer based organisation that responds to emergencies and works to ensure the safety of communities around Victoria, is the lead agency for responding to floods, storms and earthquakes in the state. It also operates the largest road rescue network in Australia.

The organisation works closely with other emergency services including the Victoria Police and provides support to municipal councils when planning and auditing emergency management plans. These services are provided by a network of 5,500 volunteers who maintain the service 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The organisation’s website (http://www.ses.vic.gov.au) acts as a central information portal for the residents of Victoria in the event of an emergency.

The challenge faced by VICSES is that its website does not receive a regular flow of internet traffic and is only accessed by large numbers of people when emergencies occur. The number of visitors can go from very few to many thousands in a matter of minutes if an incident occurs. The other issue faced by VICSES was that it was hosting its own site in Victoria. In the event of a major disaster such as an earthquake or Tsunami the chances of its data being irretrievable were high.

In February 2011 VICSES began looking for a new external hosting provider for its website and a new content management system to keep its site up to date and always available. Hostworks and PretaWeb, a developer of specialist content management solutions, provided a joint proposal to VICSES addressing all its needs and ensuring that the necessary requirements were met. A key factor in the decision to work with Hostworks was that its data centres were located in Adelaide and Sydney providing back up in two out-of-state, geographically-separated locations.

The open source content management system Plone was essential to ensuring the success of this project. Plone works equally well to create both public websites, Extranets and intranets, something not many CMS's are capable of. Plone's multi-site capabilities allowed the VIC SES to get all their current and future needs delivered in one redundant scalable platform, greatly increasing their capabilities with the project costs. Plone has the best security record of any open source CMS protecting the SES from hacking. Plone's outstanding builtin cache management capabilities work with HostWorks CDN enabling the VIC SES site to handle such high loads. Plone is open source, meaning costs were lower and the VIC VIC SES had access to a world-wide eco-system of plugins and support from the Plone Community. Plone's unique Diazo theming system enables the VIC SES to have complete control over the site design allowing them to develop exactly the site they wanted.

Use of open source technology in government reduces redundancies

vchoy — 2012-03-08T00:17:27Z

The public administration of Galicia (Spain) should increase its use of free and open source software and use the resulting cost savings to avoid laying off civil servants.

Maturing best practices have emerged to help agencies implement shared services right

vchoy — 2012-02-29T05:55:00Z

Shared services offer money-saving economies of scale for governments at all levels and opportunities for rolling out new services more quickly to clients.

Read the white paper by The Centre for Digital Government.

UK Government publishes open source guidelines

vchoy — 2011-11-09T00:50:00Z

"The purpose of this toolkit is to ensure that there is a level playing field for open source and proprietary software and that some of the myths associated with open source are dispelled," the website says. It aims to provide best practice for evaluating the use of open source software.

Visit the Cabinet Office's website.

French PM demands widespread use of free and open formats in government

vchoy — 2011-10-07T00:30:00Z

The appeal was made by Prime Minister François Fillon on 31 August 2011 at a meeting of the Council of Ministers regarding free and open formats, in the context of opening up government information. This move is deemed by the French advocacy organisation for free software and open standards to be consistent with the determination to make public data available. The meeting used this occasion to stress that free software enables effective use of free and open formats.

Read more here.

UK taxpayers' money squandered on failed IT Projects

vchoy — 2011-09-26T01:05:00Z

Second, they must open up competition to new contractors ie reform the procurement process. It is estimated the six biggest firms win nearly four-fifths of contracts, despite often-lamentable track records.

And, third, technicians and contractors should make more use of open-source software and open standards, which allows systems made by rival — and smaller — manufacturers to work together.

Read more at the Daily Mail.

City of Munich makes the move to open source on desktops

vchoy — 2011-09-05T01:05:00Z

The majority of the city's open source desktops will be running Ubuntu GNU/Linux, Maier said. A few months ago, the city decided to move from Debian GNU/Linux to its derivative Ubuntu. According to Maier, that is mainly because the decision makers are attracted by Ubuntu's long term support offering and hardware compatibility.

Indian Government issues open source operating system policy

vchoy — 2011-07-12T01:50:00Z

The policy outlines the use of operating systems and device drivers in all new e-governance projects. The objective is to provide e-Government services, which are technology-neutral, cost effective, interoperable and vendor-neutral.

World Economic Forum advocates open governments

vchoy — 2011-06-17T00:20:00Z

A report released from the World Economic Forum emphasises the importance of governments to build slim and streamlined organisations that can thrive in the new world order. Open governments that share labour, services and resources through collaboration and Gov 2.0 strategies can remain slim while delivering on their mission in effective and innovative ways such as the use of open source technologies.

Read more from the Innovation Knowledge Foundation.

Open Source to be in majority use by 2016

vchoy — 2011-05-23T00:45:00Z

For the first year ever since the survey was conducted five years ago, freedom from vendor lock-in was cited as the feature that makes such software more attractive, respondents said.

US agency leading the way with Open Source and the Cloud

vchoy — 2011-05-20T07:04:19Z

The new FCC website is centred around three activities: file a public comment, file a complaint, and search for information relating to interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. Each proceeding before the agency is fully available for scrutiny, comment and collaboration thus aligning with the policy of open government all driven by open source technology and the Cloud.

Australian Government issues new open source procurement policy

vchoy — 2011-02-08T06:48:01Z

Special Minister of State Gary Gray today released the revised Australian Government Open Source Software Policy, which requires agencies to consider both open source and proprietary software for all ICT procurements.

e-government becomes the public safety net

vchoy — 2011-01-06T06:00:00Z

Saving tax dollars with shared services

vchoy — 2010-12-13T02:00:00Z

To cope with the recession, state and local governments have had to come up with innovative solutions to continue the public’s work – a more collaborative type of government where jurisdictions find strength in numbers and a more efficient way of governing through shared services approaches.

Fall out from the global financial crisis has forced Governments to adopt strategies that increase the capability of government while using less tax dollars. An efficient way is through shared services such as PretaCloud.

Download the white paper here.

Sydney and Newcastle Buses goes live with 27,344 sessions per day.

vchoy — 2010-09-20T05:52:14Z

NSW State Transit's high profile websites have cut-over to a Plone powered multi-site solution. These high load, high availability websites are hosted on the NSW Government Chief Information Office's shared web platform bringing cost savings and the latest Gov 2.0 technology to NSW tax payers.