The Open World Forum (OWF) is an international organization based in Paris, France. OWF organized an event in December 2008 which brought together people from across the FLOSS spectrum: programmers, advocates, corporate and small business users, hobbyists, academics and investors. OWF’s focus is the future of information technology within the context of the FLOSS revolution. One significant outcome of the 2008 event was the culmination of strategic, tactical and political discussions in the form of a roadmap through the year 2020.

This first version of the roadmap is open for comments and will be re-assessed annually during the OWF event. Experts from all around the world will conduct studies in 7 key themes (public policies, innovation, ecosystems, cloud computing, IT governance, careers and FLOSS in an open world). The OWF 2020 FLOSS Roadmap can be downloaded here.

The Brazilian government’s experience with FLOSS was chosen as one of the best real-world cases for the adoption of free software in the public sector. The case was presented by Professor Christiana Freitas, from the University of Brasília (UNB), and Corinto Meffe, coordinator of Brazil’s Portal do Software Público. All of the key themes will be evaluated annually until 2020, documenting the positive and negative experiences and results.

The Public Software Portal of Brazil works to aggregate all the initiatives with FLOSS inside of the Brazillian government. It also connects them with the community in that it’s open to anyone (companies, individuals, etc) who want to contribute or propose a new solution. It’s an important step forward when the citizens of a country can see and contribute to the technology and the source code used by their government to serve them. This is a level of transparency that, without doubt, has become a critical element of modern democracies.

Many of the predictions in the existing roadmap have already started to come to fruition. For example, FLOSS has already begun to bridge the global digital divide. FLOSS continues to become more and more mainstream, despite the billion-dollar initiatives to marginalize it.

In particular, North by South is interested in OWF’s prediction that “FLOSS communities are enablers of Business Ecosystems” — the unique nature of North by South’s business structure is an early example of this prediction. NXS operates as a distributed, global company with a flexible network instead of a monolithic corporate structure.

OWF makes a number of other predictions as well as recommendations for the expansion of FLOSS adoption. North by South is proud to do its part in contributing to these recommendations for success.

As countries around the world modernize their public elections process, the big problem with electronic voting machines is that the market is moving slow to provide equipment which fulfills all of the requirements for a fully democratic election. In many cases, printed proof of a citizen’s vote is still needed, in case the machine has buggy software or if there is suspicion of fraud. This problem, amongst others, are being floated around the voting machine industry. The Secretary of State from California, Debora Bowen, spoke at EmTech (Emerging Technologies Conference) and said that if the e-voting machines used free software, they would be easier to certify as trustable.

She explains that the county decision-makers who are responsible for choosing an e-voting solution for their political jurisdiction have a hard time with proprietary, closed voting machines because they can’t see the code to certify their reliability. It has being proved, that the most popular (and proprietary) electronic voting machines have security holes. And, with a bizarre twist added by intellectual property laws, not only the code but even the voting data submitted to the machine belongs to the e-voting machine company — and not the state or the people, a problem faced in Ohio when a government audit of Diebold voting machines was attempted. What’s worse, Diebold has a proven history of lying followed by cover-up attempts through censorship (in a case that involved the Community Colo in the SF Bay Area).

Bowen believes that if the code is not closed by copyright, the government can analyze the system and certify that it is secure enough to be used during a election.

Showing that in some was the United States needs to catch up to democratic innovations, Latin America has already chosen free software for their voting machines. In Brazil, the government migrated all of its e-voting machines to free software, after months of audits by different authorities and experts and, this year, state elections will use the free software system.

During Linuxworld 2008, a free software e-voting system was set up for a test run by the attendees. The solution was presented by the Open Voting Consortium, a group formed after the contentious presidential election of 2000. The solution is a normal PC using Ubunto OS and free software, set up with a flat computer screen and mouse, a paper receipt with the vote on it and a bar code that can be used for counting votes. So, the way it works is a voter goes to the machine, votes, confirms the vote, gets their receipt, and then scans in their vote with the receipt. This paper is then left at the voting space in case an audit is required.

For more information, see this article from Amanda McPherson from the Linux Foundation: Could Linux Change Democracy?. Also, see this interview with Aviel “Avi” Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and an e-voting activist, who defends independent software and cryptography as part of a trustable solution.

Brazil has recently announced that they’ll be using Linux as the basis for their electronic voting machines, away from Windows CE. In addition, open source software will be used in the auditing process as well as digitally signed verification of the code. This is a significantly different process than used in the United States where a closed source, proprietary system for voting machines was developed by Diebold, a company in North Canton, Ohio which was exposed by a whistle-blower to be lying about the security of their voting machines, which led to a lawsuit against them led by the EFF because of a DMCA takedown order received by none other than your local community colo! Did we forget to mention that Walden O’Dell, then CEO of Diebold, had said that he was committed to delivering votes to Bush in a Republican fund-raising letter for the 2004 election? Things that make you go hmmmm!

Major newspapers are reporting that Brazil will start switching to electronic voting machines, beginning with the 2008 municipal elections, that are based on Linux. Compared to the closed source, corruption-riddled voting machine scandals happening in the United States with right-wing companies like Diebold, one has to wonder how the United States can still pretend like we are the model of democratic innovation.