ConsultationXML is now Open Source
We’re terribly, fantastically pleased to announce that after a bit of wrangling, Steph Gray and I are able to release ConsultationXML as open source software under the GNU Affero license. The recent report on open source software in Government hinted that departments ought to try to release source code for the software they commission, and we’re delighted to be (we think!) the first to do so.
We’re not sure who will want to play with it yet. We hope that other departments will want to deploy and use the tool to improve their consultation offerings. It may be that people in the private sector will find some use for it. People have already used ConsultationXML for really neat things that we didn’t expect, so anything could happen: which is, of course, the point.
We ran this by the renowned geek-come-blogger-come-minister, Tom Watson, who had good things to say:
I think this is a great tool. We’ve just announced the Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use report on the use of open source software in government, an element of which was to encourage government to contribute to the world of open source software, and this is the first practical expression of that goal.
For more information about ConsultationXML, and to download it, head over here.
6 Responses to “ConsultationXML is now Open Source”
Leave a Reply
Harry Metcalfe
Harry is Dextrous Web's Managing Director. He blogs projects, technical musings and anything else that seems interesting.
[...] Harry’s explained over on The Dextrous Web, we’ve just open sourced the code behind ConsultationXML, the tool [...]
This is fantastic news a real positive first step for the government in its open source future. Congratulations on getting past all the red tape
Thanks — hopefully this won’t be the last time!
[...] well as software, this also applies to government interface standards. ”ConsultationXML is now Open Source, as announced in this post on [...]
Harry and Steph
Cool – some serious innovation and enterprise from collaboration
All power to agile software development
As a tax-payer I am thrilled
If you can re-cycle the savings into dementia research, so much the better
[...] At the beginning of February Steph Gray blogged here about a new piece of open source software he was developing. It has now appeared courtesy of the TheDextrousWeb [...]