It's quite sad, and unnerving, that governments seem to be so slow to adopting modern technologies to make it's functionalities as streamed lined to make it work more efficiently. With the limited resources governments have, they have to be a lot more conscious on how they use them with the biggest impact.
One of the areas that would help, would be using open source software to build a common platform for the government. Mainly because by using open source software, government wouldn't be tied up to a single provider to maintain the systems they use. They would be able to actually make better use of the resources they got, by actually being free to pick the service provider that gives them the best value for what they expend on their services.
The adoption of open source software by all the government agencies, has the added benefit that all their operations will become more transparent. Not by allowing full access to their data, but on how they work.
Not all the data that the government manages should be made available, since some some of is sensitive enough that being shared would do more harm than good. But, it order to keep them honest, how they operate should be as open and transparent as possible. And the open source software development model is the best way to achieve this end.
Most importantly, by coming to open source software the systems that the government uses wouldn't be at the expense of whatever the vendor that provides the services decides to do with the software it provides. Open source software would give the control over the government agencies, and ultimately to the people that they serve.
At the end, its for our best interest to make sure that governments employ open source at all levels.
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