Mark Jaquith has written a list of government agencies using WordPress — a piece of blogging software that also has great content management and distributed authoring capability. The list of comments that follows is most ammusing, particularly the slogans:
“WordPress, secure enough for the NSA”
and
“WordPress, intelligent enough for the CIA”
Infact, both WordPress and MediaWiki form the backbone of the US Intelligence Community’s Intellipedia wiki. And it’s not only because of the price associated with open source tools. They are a great way for individuals from all parts of government to collaborate and share information on lessons learned on projects and ways to make processes within government agencies more efficient.
Implicit in this list of Mark’s and its associated comments is the message that these simple open source tools are mature and robust enough to comply with the security and recordkeeping requirements typical of government organisations. These requirements, according to the National Archives of Australia, are about “good business and … efficient administration” and relate to “evidence of government accountability.” Specifically, these requirements in Australia are:
- Archives Act 1983
- Freedom of Information Act 1982
- Privacy Act 1988
- Evidence Act 1995
- Electronic Transactions Act 1999
- Crimes Act 1914
- Financial Management and Accountability Act 1977
- Public Service Act 1999
Fortunately, WordPress and many other popular open source social computing products like MediaWiki, include the sorts of audit control seen in recordkeeping systems, including:
- Content version control and archival control to facilitate appraisal, sentencing and destruction
- Time/date stamps for content creation and modification
- User profiles for audit trails of who edited what and when (that can also be integrated with single sign-on typically provided by Lotus Notes or Microsoft Windows environments)
- Use of business thesaurus (taxonomy) for classification of content (even Keyword AAA if you really wanted to … not that anyone other than your records manager would know what it was)
- Authentication control for commenting and contributing to conversations, just as they have for Intellipedia
Together, this suite of functionallity supports a government organisation’s need [1] for information to be an accurate and reliable record of an increasingly common emerging social online interaction involving the exchange of information and ideas.
When considering whether open source software meets your organisation’s requirements for recordkeeping you don’t need to think twice about tools like WordPress any longer. Just pull out that copy of DIRKS [2] and start ticking the boxes!
For more about IT System design and records management requirements see the National Archives’ website: http://naa.gov.au/records-management/systems/design/index.aspx
M
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1. Improving Electronic Document Management: Guidelines for Australian Government Agencies, Office of Government Information Technology, 1995.
2.DIRKS. Developing and Implementing Recordkeeping Systems. DIRKS Manual: A Strategic Approach to Managing Business Information, September 2001, Revised July 2003, ISBN 0 642 34449 3.
27 August, 2008 at 12:03 am |
You would think that the Australian government will follow the americans on that as well, right?
One of the main problems in Australian government departments is that most of the actual people involved with most web teams don’t have enough knowledge about it, others just take it as a secure public service job and don’t care about it, others feel they will not have control of their sites and so they don’t want to implement anything to it and there are also some people who just have no idea about the web but some how got the job there….
It is so frustrating working in a place where they see the gov sites as another folder in their network…