3 ms·

While I dont agreed that all software used by the government needs to be open source and it strikes me that certain software needs to be more than proprietary e

• acdha 3y ago
  I think there’s also an interesting angle around how and when it becomes open source. You could imagine an escrow-type model where someone selling, say, law-enforcement software might not be required to release it publicly but would be required to escrow every version used by clients and make it available to auditors or defense teams. There’s an interesting balance between allowing people to keep competitive secrets while still allowing oversight and that’s going to require some adjustments over time.
• jruohonen 3y ago
  Much more than that. Insofar as we are talking about public law, I'd argue that ML for granting welfare benefits, calculating taxes, loaning books from a local library, ticket reserving for public transport, and whatever else goes on in mundane public administration should be open source or at least transparent, including with respect to training data and basic performance metrics like ROCs etc. Note that the argument about trade secrets, by definition, cannot apply in this context, although a practical problem is that public administrations have outsourced their stuff to the private sector (sometimes with catastrophically bad outcomes). It will be interesting to see whether people will increasingly challenge public sector algorithms through FOIs in the future, as I am pretty sure they'll do.