For our current newsletter I wrote a short summary of what I experienced during my 100 first days in the Bernese City Parliament:

100 Tage im Berner Stadtrat

Eines vorweg: Stadtpolitik macht mir Spass – viel mehr als ich zuvor gedacht hatte. Einerseits konnte ich in Kürze Kontakt zu vielen spannenden Menschen im Stadtparlament und in der Stadtverwaltung knüpfen. Andererseits spürte ich schon zu Beginn, dass man im Stadtrat tatsächlich etwas bewegen kann.

Open-Source-Software
Am 20. Oktober 2011 startete ich mit meiner ersten Sitzung. Eigentlich hatte ich mir vorgenommen, die ersten paar Male zuzuhören und zu lernen, wie der Ratsbetrieb so zugeht. Es lief anders. Da bekannt war, dass es bei der erwähnten Stadtratssitzung um ein Informatik- Geschäft ging, das ich nicht befürworten konnte, nahm ich im Vorfeld Kontakt auf mit meiner und anderen Fraktionen. So gelang es uns, mit 35 zu 27 Stimmen das Geschäft an den Gemeinderat zurückzuweisen. Im Anschluss daran erarbeitete ich eine überfraktionelle Motion für die Erarbeitung und Umsetzung einer Open-Source-Förderstrategie aus.

«Zaffaraya»
In der selben Zeit kontaktierte mich zudem der Leist Oberbottigen. Es ging um die Umzonung, die der Gemeinderat in Riedbach für experimentelles Wohnen plant. Ich informierte mich über dieses Thema und reichte Anfang Januar eine Interpellation mit einigen kritischen Fragen an die Stadtregierung ein. In den nächsten Monaten wollen wir dann in Oberbottigen den Berner Dokufilm «Zaffaraya 3.0» vorführen und so die Diskussion zur Umzonung im Dorf anstossen.

Zeitmanagement
Alles in allem ein spannender Start. Der einzige Wermutstropfen ist die stark begrenzte Zeit, die mir als Milizpolitiker vorgegeben ist. So muss ich mich noch im Zeitmanagement üben, um mich auch in die anderen vielen wichtigen Themen der Stadtpolitik einarbeiten zu können.

Today I read a (German) t3n.de article on mega trends 2012. While I agree with most of the expert’s hype assumptions I missed a statement about the recent developments in the area of open source as well as digital sustainability in general. (At least Ulrike Langer briefly points out the worldwide open data movement.)

I believe there is a “silent mega trend” towards digital sustainability. Current initiatives around open data, open source, open standards, open content, open access etc. show the growing community beyond the commercialized digital world. Its main focus is not how companies can build the most lucrative business models with new technologies but how our society can benefit the most of ICT.

Here are some random evidences (which I’m involved in) that show the growing interest on topics around digital sustainability:

• European governments are focussing more and more strategically on open source software. Next week there will be a workshop at the Open Source World Conference in Granada organized by the European Commission. Several initiatives and projects will be presented, among them I’ll talk about OpenJustitia, the new open source project by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland.
• Initiated through a workshop in October 2011 several public institutions from Germany and Switzerland jointly defined the requirements on how to improve OOXML support in LibreOffice/OpenOffice. There is a publicly available 7p specification that offers open source companies to create a proposal. The announcement was published in many different international open source and technology news platforms, among them The H Open.
• This year there will be a study on the current status of open source adoption in Switzerland, lead by /ch/open and SwissICT and conducted by Ernst & Young. The goal will be to identify the reasons, benefits and obstacles of SMEs, large corporations, and government agencies to use open source software. Until the end of this month there is a Call for Participation for supporting the study. Several firms and public institutions have already confirmed their participation.
• Just before Christmas 60 participants of the annual dinner of the Parliamentarian Group for Digital Sustainability met on the topic of open government data. The highlight of the evening was the initial signing of the Open Government Data Manifest Switzerland by most of the attending politicians.
• Recently a small group of experts met for a thought leadership workshop on how to exactly define the term “digital sustainability” (in German “Digitale Nachhaltigkeit“). Georg Greve wrote a blog post about the event and some of its outcome. Currently we’re working on a small paper on the concept of digital sustainability containing a list of criterias. Soon there will be a first draft version be published for public review.
• The Swiss foundation Lilienberg Unternehmerforum is planning to physically equip a multimedia room on the topic of digital sustainability. Soon there will be a Call for Participation in order to staff the team that defines and creates the content of presentation.

At first sight Small and Medium Companies (SMEs) may not seem very attracted to open source software (OSS). They have little to save in IT costs if they use e.g. desktop Linux but lots of work to integrate and learn how to use OSS. However, the big potential for SMEs actually comes when they collaboratively develop and maintain certain industry software.

This could be coordinated through their local industry association contracting an open source software company to adapt existing ERP or CRM solutions to specific national regulations. Or the association could even appoint an OSS development company to create a new core business process software. By pooling the resources SMEs can on the one hand save money for the initial purchase of the software and on the other hand share the maintenance costs on the long run.

Recently I did a presentation about the chances of open source software for SMEs at the Chamber of Commerce in Liestal. The audience took it up well and the press reported positively about the event.

(The idea of resource pooling for collaborative open source development by software users works as the recent workshop regarding OOXML improvements in LibreOffice/OpenOffice showed.)

Update 2012-01-04: Just before Xmas a national magazine for SMEs published an article about this topic: Den ande­ren Blick wagen — Der Nut­zen von Open Source Soft­ware für kleine Unternehmen

Today I had my first day in the city council of Bern. It was a great experience, especially, because I already spoke in the plenum regarding a planned Microsoft Enterprise Agreement. By mobilizing other parties of the parliament we finally won the votation! It’s now already in the online news (Berner Zeitung).

Meanwhile my national election campaign continues. This weekend we’ll see who will go to direct Switzerland the next four years! Here is the campaign of Marc Jost and myself: 2 for 3 - two young politicians for three sustainable topics

I did a presentation at the LibreOffice conference in Paris about our workshop on improving OOXML support within LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org:

Three years ago I ran for the Bernese Parliament and was voted as “first replacement”. This fall Barbara Streit will step down a year prior to the city elections, therefore giving me the opportunity to join the Bernese Parliament for the EVP Stadt Bern. Although this will mean quite a lot of work, I’m very happy to become a parliamentarian myself for the first time.

Having worked a lot with local and national politicians in recent years I think I know what it means to do parliamentarian work. However, having now the flexibility to post policy suggestions and to do talks to the government and public administration myself increases my motivation a lot. Therefore I’m looking forward to this excieting new phase of my live.

Interview in the EVP Info Stadt Bern

Update 2011-09-23: Today’s newspaper Der Bund brought a small sidenote on the change in the Bernese parliament.

The work of more than half a year is finally seeing daylight: Our new Ernst & Young brochure Open source software in business-critical environments is online as free PDF in German as well as in English.

The broad feedback, especially from the usually highly critical German blog community, is very positive. Also the breakfast events in Bern and Zürich end of June where we presented the paper for the first time were a success: More than 70 participants from banks and insurance companies joined the sessions.

Our parliamentarian group for digital sustainability sent out a press release. And fere is the video recording of my speech in Vienna about the brochure:

More speeches about open source benefits and risks coming up this and next month at ISACA Switzerland and the Wirtschaftskammer Baselland:

Promising times for open source: During the last two weeks I had two opportunities to talk about open source in two different European capital cities.

First I spoke in Vienna at the OSS BIG (Open Source Software Business Information Group) Conference about Ernst & Young’s new open source brochure “Open Source Software in Business-Critical Environments”.

Last week I was invited to Red Hat’s EMEA Partner Summit in Dublin to talk about “Doing the Impossible: Managing Open Source Communities”. I even got the honor to be interviewed by the legendary Linux Outlaws on my open source lobbying work and more things (46.4 MB MP3 or 50.6 MB OGG, starting at 1:12:08).

Today I had the opportunity to present an introduction, some case studies and the Swiss activities related to Open Government Data at the eGov Lunch of the Berne University of Applied Sciences. I presented the following examples of Open Government Data initiatives and applications:

http://www.data.gov
http://data.gov.uk
http://www.opencongress.org
http://www.openspending.org
http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org
http://www.fixmystreet.com
http://energy.publicdata.eu
http://www.police.uk
http://www.opendata-showroom.org

Here are the slides of the presentation:

Mid April André Golliez and I were invited to teach a guest lecture at Lucerne University of Applied Scienes on Digitale Dustainability and Open Government Data: