Managing content the open source way

As the standards are generally international in basis, the customisation work done for APLAWS can ultimately be reused by government bodies in other countries. The metadata standards, for one, are all extensions of an international standard called the Dublin Core. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has adopted APLAWS for its huge intranet, and the Italian city of Torino also has the CMS under consideration. Giles Palmer, managing director of Runtime Collective, one of the companies providing support for APLAWS, says word of mouth has turned the system into the fastest-growing CMS product on the market, largely because of its open source licensing and standards support. "It is very niche, very targeted, but it can jump from that niche in the future," he says.

Open source
When deciding to roll out APLAWS, local authorities also get to decide on their own arrangements for technical support and development, something that would be unheard of with a proprietary product. Currently the project has persuaded a handful of companies, including Red Hat and Runtime, to offer commercial support; authorities can find local alternatives or decide to rely on internal resources. New features and bugfixes developed for each authority feed into a central code repository, ensuring there is no overlap in the work and that the code doesn't fork. There is also an active user group.

Getting the main partners to use a single code base has been one of APLAWS' biggest achievements, Dell says. "This has helped us a lot to avoid the forking of code, which was one of our main concerns," he says. "Now we have full confidence that we can do it." Major overhauls, such as APLAWS+, have so far been carried out with funding from wider central government initiatives.

The project's open source licence has attracted some but caused confusion for others, Dell concedes. "Not everyone is familiar with the open source model, what it means to have the direction of the code in your hands, in the hands of the community. That is something we've had to deal with," he says. "The changes you make are defining the direction of the product, and as a participant, you have to be aware of that and manage it as much as possible."

At the management level the perceptions of open source are even worse. "There is the misconception that open source projects are done in a volunteer type of environment by people who are not completely committed. They think of freeware, a student typing in a room," he says. "In our case, this is a real enterprise-level application, with vendors supporting it and taking it as their real business model. The fact that it is open source is just another benefit."

The project leaders are now looking to shift APLAWS from simply being a project to more of a sustainable product, with a steering committee and more companies offering support, says Dell. "We would ultimately like to see an O'Reilly book on the shelf, 'Learn APLAWS'. Then it would be a real product," he says.