Adapting IT Governance Frameworks for Free and Open Source Software policy implementation

The full title of this talk was “Adapting IT Governance Frameworks to Ensure Control and Visibility of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)”. It was given at the 3rd Government CIO Summit which took place in Cape Town, 27- 30 May 2013. In it I talked about using metrics to measure success of the Government FOSS Strategy implementation.

This was 2013, it was the height of the Zuma years, the destruction of governance and state capture were underway with earnest. With one or two exceptions, the government CIOs were ignoring the FOSS policy, and could get away with it because the policy implementation was entirely ungoverned and unmanaged. Nobody was accountable.

One wonders, now that we are moving beyond the Zumafication years, with massive corruption and state capture, whether our FOSS policy can be rekindled. Perhaps it could be in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), where free and open thinking could have a positive impact on our ability as a nation to claim some of the new technology developments. It need not be just software, free and open can apply to anything.