Tariq Rashid on Open Source in Government at the Open Gov Summit 2012 from Zaizi Ltd on Vimeo.
The Home Office Presentation Summary
Tariq will present the Open Source Strand of the ICT Strategy, and the action plan to address barriers to a level playing field for open source in Government IT.
He will explain the wider context of the ICT Strategy’s aim to do IT better and for better value, and focus on open source and its potential benefits. He will aslo be covering highlights from both the public and private sectors, and explaining the genuine risks and busting common myths.
This presentation will make clear the obligations for Government IT leaders to ensure a level playing field to optimise value from ICT, and some of the current challenges and support to achieving this.
Tariq Rashid’s Profile Summary
Tariq Rashid is the Lead Architect at the Home Office (Information, Applications, Infrastructure, Open Standards, Open Source), with special responsibility for open source, open standards and information management. He works closely with the Cabinet Office to support wider Government progress in these domains.
He has worked with open source since 1995 in a range of sectors including energy, banking, media and high tech start-ups. His first taste of open source was of FORTRAN compilers and document preparation systems. Since then he has journeyed through open source VPN network stack development, search engines, enterprise support systems, numerical computing and now cloud platforms.
He is convinced that open computing is the only way to encourage innovation, enable reuse, drive competition, and empower the customer.
Tariq in the press and at other speaking events:
PuffBox (Feb 25th 2011): Quote from Tariq Rashid, “If the Cabinet Office starts producing an assessment model to separate good software from bad software, looking at things like support, how established is it, is there good governance around development, these sorts of things. That would enable customers to say, ‘We want to use WordPress and according to this model it’s not going to fail”.
Tariq at the Transfer Summit 2011: UK Government Open Source Action Plan
Mapping the changing landscape of Free Software in the British Public Sector: Tariq Rashid, Lead Architect at the Home Office, said that ”The Cabinet Office is working on an open source, a software assessment model, a CIO training programme and an system to survey open source use in government”.
In the same week Rashid drafted a list of suggested Free Software applications, designed to help suppliers consider alternatives to traditional proprietary solutions. This includes recommendations such as Gimp, Drupal, PostgresSQL,SugarCRM, and CentOS.
Speaker at Civil Service World: Implementing Effective ICT: open source software
A presentation on the use of open source software in the public sector, given by Tariq Rashid, lead architect for the Home Office’s IT Technology solutions and assurance team.
The presentation was given at the ‘Implementing Effective ICT’ summit in December 2011. This event brought together government departments, executive agencies, non departmental public bodies and the wider public sector together with the ICT industry to investigate the impact of the Strategy. Discussing the key issues around PSN, the G-Cloud, Open Source Software, and agile ICT; this event will provide an invaluable opportunity for all stakeholders to be informed on and influence the opportunities and challenges of reform.
Speaker at Government ICT Summit: Implementing Open Source Software Across the Public Sector