Selling Open Source on the Campaign Trail

Waldo Jaquith writes: "I'm a long-time advocate and user of open source and free software and, as of this morning, I am a candidate for the Charlottesville, VA (USA) City Council. Naturally, I see lots of areas in Charlottesville's IT infrastructure (as well as potential areas of expansion) where Linux and various free software projects would be ideal. But can I make that a talking point while campaigning? How do I make that concept accessible and interesting to 40,000 citizens?"

Comments

Simple: "Show me the money?"

[Uttles]

What do voters care about? Taxes. It's that simple. So, you want to get elected, voters want lower taxes. How do you react to this situation? Find a way to lower, or at least not increase, taxes. Open source solutions are free. Maintenance of such systems, contrary to what M$ heads would have you believe, is about the same cost, maybe even less (because once it's running, it JUST WORKS.) Now, let's follow along to make a logical conclusion:

You want to be on the council.
The voters don't want to pay as much tax.
You want to use something that's free for IT purposes.
Tell the voters that using free software would reduce costs!
The voters will automatically imply that your action of reducing costs will lead to lowered taxes and BAM!! you're elected.

Good luck!

Re:Simple: "Show me the money?"

[4of12]

Don't forget to mention in passing that the open source free software has been built up over many years in the world's leading universites and government institutions and it's high time that our governments took advantage of its investment in these quality resources. Otherwise, most voters will confuse free software with free beer ware and the crap they've downloaded for "free" off the internet that gave them a virus and nags them constantly to send money to a purported author.

But OSS is but one very small part of the total equation of running and getting elected to local government.

The big thing is, indeed, "show me the money". First, taxes. Second, visible services, like how many hours you stand in line at the Motor Vehicle Department to get a new drivers license.

What impresses voters are politicians that fix potholes, pass ordinances against noise, are in favor of police, firefighters and teachers.

Other measures are more controversial and if you want to get elected you'd best steer clear of divisive issues (such as zoning of a megastore) where 90% of the people are on one side of the issue and 90% of the money is on the other side of the issue. You can take care of those according to your conscience once you've made it into office.

Re:Simple: "Show me the money?"

[drunkmonk]

I don't think that taxes are really the focus of a city that size... I'd push that the money could be used to fix the big pothole on Second Street, to build a new park or add a new wing onto the local high school's science building or whatever. Offer them something tangible, which will not only make them happier but improve the overall value of the city.

It's not appropriate

[blamanj]

As a citizen, do you think I want to know what brand asphalt you're going to use to fill the potholes? No, I just want to get it done. Details like that are for you and your staff to work out.

Re:It's not appropriate

[ChaosDiscordSimple]

As a citizen, do you think I want to know what brand asphalt you're going to use to fill the potholes?

Actually, if some of the asphalt vendors have "Asphalt User License Agreements" that restrict the local government's usage of the asphalt, expose the government to random audits and potentially crippling fines for violations of the license agreement, I would be very interested in my local goverments choice in asphalt.

(And since I suspect that agreements like this actually exist for some government construction projects, I really do want politicians discuss such issues.)

Re:It's not appropriate

[blamanj]

But what about the voting citizens? They're alot smaller, some of them do care what kind of asphalt you use.

Invite all three of them to a public hearing.

Seriously, this is not a campaign issue. It is a means to an end, e.g., if I can save money, make govt. run more efficiently, etc., then you campaign on those items as issues and when or if you get into a discussion on details, then you bring up the processes and techniques you'll use.

Indirectly?

[benedict]

I suspect that talking about "open source" won't
mean a lot to your constituency. However, you can
say that you have ideas about how to streamline
governmental IT budgets without cutting services.

A more subtle point is that open source improves
openness. Using open file formats and protocols
protects the government and the public from vendor
lock-in. It also improves the chance that government archives will still be accessible in
the middling and distant future. I don't know
how you can make these points sound-bite-friendly,
but it's worth thinking about.

Who are you kidding?

[FallLine]

When was the last time that such minutia actually changed your vote one way or the other unless it directly affected you? Probably never.

Even if you THINK you do, I doubt you really do. In order to make an informed decision on these matters must spend SOME time learning the background and the difference between the competing alternatives. Even with an issue like Open Source, there is considerable debate in the technical community about whether or not it actually saves money and it's got to be even harder for the average person to make heads or tails of it. It's not as if there's a simple authoritative source you can go to that says Open Source > Closed Source. It may be trivial to discover that the software itself takes money to actually purchase, but finding out the actual support costs, training, quality of the software, and other elements takes a lot of time and intuition. Speaking for myself, I'd actually be opposed to this kind of adoption, especially in a government agency.

Now you're going to do this kind of research for each and every little item? Asphalt? Shovels? Paper? Paper clips? It may sound ridiculous, but I doubt software costs more than .5% of the local government costs. All these decisions take time, far too much time for the average voter to concern themselves with. We have public officials and representatives for a reason.

This argument is especially ridiculous when you consider that the kinds of day to day payroll decisions made by managers have a far greater impact and cost far more. For instance, would you rather have an experienced admin run NT or a bunch of clowns running Linux? I know which I'd pick. Yet it's blatantly obvious that we can't effectively engage in this kind of oversight.