Mediaboss Marketing

At a recent meeting of the MIT Open Source Planning Tools Group, I had the pleasure of hosting Zak Rogoff campaigns manager at the Free Software Foundation for an open-ended discussion on the potential for free and open tools for urban planners, community development organizations, and citizen activists. The conversation ranged over broad terrain in an exploratory mode, perhaps uncovering more questions than answers, but we did succeed in identifying some of the more common software (and other) tools needed by planners, designers, developers, and advocates, and shared some thoughts on the current state of FOSS options and their relative levels of adoption.

Included were the usual suspects LibreOffice for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations; QGIS and OpenStreetMap for mapping; and (my favorite) R for statistical analysis but we began to explore other areas as well, trying to get a sense of what more advanced tools (and data) planners use for, say, regional economic forecasts, climate change modeling, or real-time transportation management. (Since the event took place in the Department of Urban Studies & Planning at MIT, we mostly centered on planning-related tasks, but we also touched on some tangential non-planning needs of public agencies, and the potential for FOSS solutions there: assessors databases, 911 systems, library catalogs, educational software, health care exchanges, and so on.)

Importantly, we agreed from the start that to deliver on the promise of free software, planners must also secure free and open data and free, fair, and open standards: without access to data the raw material of the act of planning our tools become useless, full of empty promise.

Emerging from the discussion, moreover, was a realization of what seemed to be a natural fit between the philosophy of the free and open source software movement and the overall goals of government and nonprofit planning groups, most notably along the following lines:

Added to all this, recent government software challenges hint at the potential benefit of a FOSS development model. For example, given the botched rollout of the online health care insurance exchanges (which some have blamed on proprietary software models, and/or the difficulty of building the new public system on top of existing locked private code), groups like FSF have been presented with a teachable moment about the virtues of free and open solutions. Of course, given the current track record of adoption (spotty at best), the recognition of these lines of natural alignment begs the question, Given all this potential and all these shared values, why havent more public and non-profit groups embraced free and open software to advance their work? Our conversation began to address this question in a frank and honest way, enumerating deficiencies in the existing tools and gaps in the adoption pipeline, but quickly pivoted to a more positive framing, suggesting new and, potentially, quite productive fronts for the campaign for free and open source software, which I will present in part two. Stay tuned.

Read this article:
The public front of the free software campaign: part I