 Diwrnod, yn y peth iddynt yn mynd i gynnig fания wedi gynnig o'i gynnig y bydd yn ei gydag, dwi'n ymwneud ar maen nhw, ti'n ei drwsio'r tunig, a staff astiwn y dyfyniad yma o gyfliadau, ac efallai wedi'i'n gynhywch. Mynd i'n fuddwch i chi'n gilydd arni i ddwylo pwynt o'i cyhoedd o'i gwymo'i gilydd arbennig gan gwymo'i cyhoeddio'i defnyddol o'u gilydd mewn. I wnaeth eu cymdeilio arbennig y dyfyniadau mewn llawer o wyboddau y free software movement, and the open source software movement operate, and some of the things that the public sector needs to learn, some of the things that government needs to learn about what the free and open source software movement has got to say. I don't have, as I say, a great deal of technical knowledge. I grew up like a lot of people with computers in the house, but the first time I ever met a PC, and for a long time after I met my first PC, I thought PC is equal. I thought PC is equal to Windows, and I think many, many people live a lot of their lives thinking that, and it takes a long time for many, many people to learn that PC doesn't equal Windows, and that there are other options, and that there are choices that they're being denied if they don't think outside of that kind of tight relationship. I went away to university, and I did sign up for a computer course at university, but it was the first of many courses that I managed to completely ignore while I was at uni, so I learned very little about it there. I started eventually using computers at work, as most people do, in various different offices, and eventually a friend of mine who had been using Linux for a long time started to nag me and nag me and nag me, that I should be looking beyond the computer systems I was using. It took him a long time to get me comfortable with the idea, and gently holding my hand through a migration process on my home PC, first of all a dual booting system, and then eventually realising that I was using Windows less and less and less, and I wouldn't really miss it if I freed up the disk space for it. So, nowadays I use Linux at home, have done for quite a long time, and when I got elected to Parliament, it was the first time that I'd worked in an institution that big with an IT system that controlled by somebody else, and I found it a daily frustration having to go back to using Windows, just because I was aware of how much better the systems I was using had become. And so I started to think about why the public sector doesn't use these other systems, which are not always better, but are very often better, and I started to think about some of the political principles involved, and as I did, I started to realise that I had colleagues in other parties, not just Green Party MSP, but other parties, particularly elsewhere in Europe, countries like Germany, who had taken this thinking a lot further. And some of the ideas that they talk about are the same ideas that the movement itself, the free and open source movement talks about. Ideas like the comparison between the computer and the printing press, the idea that if when the printing press had been developed, every single one had been owned and controlled by a single monarch, or in the current analogy that a single company had been controlling and owning and deciding whatever we could use their computers for, that's the situation that we have if we allow a stranglehold by a single product like Windows. But also other ideas like the power of cooperation, and the power of cooperation and concepts like the common good have fallen out of political language in this country over recent years and recent decades. And the collaborative and cooperative process that's going on in the creation of free software and other free systems. Wikipedia is perhaps the best known now of the systems that create by an open process, a collaborative process, and it's become perhaps the single most important reference work on the web. I'm always surprised by the number of MSPs' speeches where I recognise a turn of phrase or I recognise an argument and I think, I read that on Wikipedia last night. So MSPs' researchers are using it and they're recognising the value of it and they're probably contributing to it and collaborating with it as well. So it's about the political aspects and what the public sector can learn from cooperation and collaboration. Particularly in an age when a lot of people feel disconnected from politics and feel that they can't take part or that there's no point in them taking part and contributing to politics. Also some of the economic arguments and the last speaker was at Chris, was talking in answer to a couple of the questions about the jobs and what we've got is a distributed system in economic terms. It's not entirely centralised in terms of where the ideas come from but it's not centralised in terms of where the money goes either. It's a distributed system and if that sort of system is going to take hold and become more prevalent in the public sector there's going to be an economic consequence and the public sector needs to take account of that. There was also when I was thinking about this a parallel with social enterprises and Scotland has got a long tradition of developing concepts of social enterprise like the cooperative movement. But also nowadays the way these organisations turn up new concepts like the idea of the triple bottom line, the idea of a company which is making a profit. It's not a charity but it's doing more than profit. It's not only got a single profit-based bottom line but a social and environmental bottom line as well. I think a movement like the free software movement and the companies and the communities and the individuals who are working in it and collaborating with it, they're doing more than just producing a product which will sell and which will make their name or make the money. They're doing something for other reasons. They have other bottom lines like a better product, like a way to cooperate and communicate with people around the world. Finally, as a Green, as someone from an environmentalist party, there's an environmental aspect to this. I was quite surprised to see that when Vista was being launched, Greenpeace were the first people I put out press releases saying what a problem this was. I thought, Greenpeace, what's that all about? Basically, the argument is making the best use of the hardware resources, not just in this country. If you get Vista being adopted throughout the public sector, you're getting a lot of hardware that's going to be thrown out because of that and probably onto landfill, probably not a very environmentally friendly product to dispose of. Also, in developing countries where they simply don't have access to, they don't have a budget for simply, well, we'll upgrade all our hardware this year because we've got a new operating system. Free and open source products can benefit developing countries where they don't have the money to spend on the hardware as well as the software. So, there was a number of different ideas bubbling away there about how government and the public sector need to take account of what this movement's got to say, not just the products that the free and open source movement creates, but what it's got to say as well about some of these political ideas. And lo and behold, these ideas were immediately adopted by the rest of the party and now we're using Debian to run all our party office systems around the corner on Line Street. Not entirely without problem, it's got to be said, but people seem to be up for taking on those problems and trying to get around them and learn from them. So, once I'd started thinking about these things as an MSP, I fired off a few written questions. One of the main tools that we've got is written parliamentary questions. We fired off them by email and the executive has to come up with an answer, the ministers have to come up with some sort of answer. And they were fairly innocent sort of questions about how much the parliament and how much the executive is spending on things like Microsoft operating licenses, software licenses. How much that's costing the taxpayer and what we're getting for it. It was just maybe half a dozen, I thought, fairly innocent little questions. And just days after I lodged those questions, long before I even got any reply, I got an email from the country manager of Microsoft saying how great it would be if he could take me to dinner. I thought for a few seconds about what a nice dinner Microsoft might be able to afford, but I didn't go to dinner. I didn't close down communication though. What happened was I invited him around to my office for a cup of coffee at my expense and he was happy to do that. I came away after that meeting, he'd been talking about some of these ideas and how Microsoft was really very up for this exciting new change that the open source software and the free software movements got to tell us about. And I almost came away thinking, well, yeah, he's not such a bad bloke, but he's being paid a great deal of money to persuade people like me that he's not such a bad bloke and that Microsoft is open to these ideas. What's very clear is that if the public sector, clear to me anyway, if the public sector continues to be utterly reliant as it is at the moment on a very small number of contracts with its hardware and a very small number of companies for its software, it's not going to be getting the best value for taxpayers' money. And there's also aspects, not just about buying in Windows or buying Dell PCs all the time, there's also aspects about the software that's created with taxpayers' money. When the public sector, when the NHS or the police or whoever else decide that they need some bespoke software produced, why on earth should the ownership of that software that's being produced not benefit the greatest number of people? And if that can be done best to making that free software, not necessarily changing what it is, not necessarily taking any risks with, I mean obviously some police systems, there's a very good reason, not a commercial reason but a security reason why systems might need to be closed. But if there's no reason like that then we should be, as a default position, not just as an exceptional once in a while nice to do extra if there happens to be somebody in that government department that is interested, but it should be a default position that unless there's an overriding security reason not to make something open, it should be. We paid for it as taxpayers, we should be able to use it in our own workplaces and in our own academic institutions to study it as well. There's a huge problem with overcoming perceptions and it's one that I'm sure you've talked about earlier today about what free software actually means. It's that it's not just cost free, that it's not just you don't pay any money for it, but it means something about freedom to use it to learn from it to study it to share it. There's a huge problem overcoming that perception when we're trying to persuade businesses and public sector organisations that they should adopt free software in their own work, but there's also a huge problem in trying to get over to politicians that it means something other than just cost free. We've tried to explore that with MSPs. Some MSPs get it, a few MPs get it as well and we also I think have a real job to do to try and persuade local councillors who are responsible for the part of the public sector that delivers a hell of a lot of public services directly, which MSPs don't do. We need to try and persuade them to be open minded to this as well. Partly, as I say, in delivering their services in running systems, partly in terms of education. I see no reason why the principles of free software, the way that it works shouldn't be taught as part of the curriculum in every school and college where there's IT and computing being studied. I see no reason why any student who's interested in computing should leave school without having had the opportunity to collaborate with other students around the world on free or open source projects. That seems to me like so many different educational aspirations can be achieved through that, not just the computing ones, but also the spirit of cooperation as well as some sense of who the other people that we live on this world with are and how to cooperate with them, how to learn about them. I see no reason why that shouldn't be happening in every school. How to take things forward then? It's clear that Microsoft is a big beast in this jungle and can throw its weight around. It's got a lot of weight and a lot of money. I don't know if you're aware, but last year the Microsoft Government Leaders Conference came to Edinburgh and much to my dismay, the whole Scottish Parliament was turned over to them for a day and a half to run their what they were pleased to call the Government Leaders Conference. What it turned into, I think, was a glorified local or regional Vista launch, a product launch at the taxpayer's expense, giving them the pre-use of what I think is actually quite a nice building, which we all paid a lot of money to build, and allowing them a platform, a very significant and high profile platform, not just in terms of media profile and public profile, but high profile in terms of other governments and politicians around Europe. A high profile platform was given to them from which they could say, if you want to be a modern government, you need to buy Vista. If you want to be a government that's providing services in the 21st century, you need to buy our products to do it with. And that was a shameless and a shallow sales pitch which we paid for, and I did my best to try and persuade the Parliament that we should allow at least one room to bring in a different group of people to talk about a different message or a different set of ideas. I wasn't able to do it at the time. I would love to try and do something in future. I would love to try and organise some kind of briefing event for MSPs and for several servants, people delivering services, procuring IT systems that brings in some expertise from you and your colleagues, from the businesses who are working in open source and free software, the communities, the academics who are working in it and the individuals. And if any of you have ideas to help me to take that forward, I'd love to hear from you. And that's all I've got to say, so if there are any questions, I'll do my best to have a go at them. Hi, it was going back to what you were saying about teaching children in schools about open source software, and I'm the next teacher myself which can be in a touristy technophobic profession. I do sometimes pass the time of reading old GCSE syllabuses and the current computer science syllabus, I think it's QCA, has pupils need to know that software cannot be copied and I'd highlight they cannot. They need to learn about the work of FAST and there is absolutely no mention of open source or free software whatsoever in any GCSE computer science syllabus that I've ever seen. I just want to go back to what you were saying about trying to get people over the hurdles, getting them into it and everything, and just what you think about that. Yeah, well if you were paranoid, you might think this is some kind of appalling conspiracy again. I try not to be paranoid, but it's very clear that there are some basic ideas, not just about what the legal situation is around. Public licences and the technical aspects of that, but just around the spirit of cooperation and sharing. Why on earth should we be teaching children that they're not allowed to share the toys? I remember seeing a lecture with Richard Stallman and he tells this story about the first time he was told he wasn't allowed to share with his colleagues in the next room. I think he was trying to figure out how to make a printer driver work or something. And he wasn't allowed to tell. He was allowed to know, but he wasn't allowed to tell. He wasn't allowed to share with his colleagues how to do something. And why on earth should we be teaching children that it's wrong to share? That's how basic this is and if we're saying to children that the only way software can be created is if I lease it to you but I still own it. And I can still tell you what you're allowed to do with it and what you're not allowed to do with it. I think that's profoundly depressing and it also relates to a lot else that's happening in the concepts about intellectual property in academic research as well. I was at a conference down south just at the weekend where the guys from Imperial College were talking about, they were very proudly displaying on a projector their ideas about how they do open research and how they're applying some of the same principles from open source and free software to academic research and intellectual property. And when you see it, when you see these principles just spelled out in black and white and compared with how we do things at the moment in a quite a narrow, individualistic, materialistic kind of society, you just see it in black and white and it makes perfect sense that this is what we should be doing, this should be the default. I saw a hand there and then over there. Do you want to? Hi, I know that there's a UK based website called they work for you, which is aimed to make Parliament more accessible and has sort of linked with the open source community and built on open source tools. I was just wondering what sort of profile that has within government and parliamentary members and whether that's hoping to raise the profile of open source at all or whether they're seen as some quite disconnected things. I wouldn't say it's raised the profile of open source. We are aware of it. A lot of the time we hate these things because they just bombard us with emails which we then go to answer. But we should hate it. If we're really going to be accessible to the people that we represent, we should get bombarded with emails and it is a wee bit annoying sometimes, but that's just the job that we've signed up for. There are opportunities I think to apply the same kind of principles to public policy and how politicians engage with the public. I don't know all the answers about how this should work. I think what we're at at the moment in terms of the development of democracy is quite a difficult stage. I think when political parties had mass movements and their job was to get the vote out, it was very, very simple and direct relationship with the people they represented. Now we have this crash in involvement and participation, not just in voting but in membership of political parties and in faith in politics. If we can apply some of these participative ideas, that means sometimes us not saying, this is my policy and so that's what I'm going to do. It means sometimes being a bit less precious about your own politics and your own policy, not abandoning that but being willing to create ideas with other people rather than simply saying that you've got all the answers. And it also means the public and the media not blaming politicians for changing their mind or for not having all the answers. So if politics is going to become some kind of participative process in the same way that the, I know we're getting a wee bit off topic here, but if politics is going to become a participative process in the same way and create public policy in the same way that free software is created, I think that's a very exciting idea, it's one that I don't know how we make it happen, schemes like, sites like they work for us and a number of others are part of that but they're not the whole of it and I think we need to think again about how we create space for debate in public. There have been a couple of open source political parties that have been attempted where people actually want to create the manifesto purely online as a collaborative project and the party begins with no policy at all. It tends to kind of fall apart because you're bringing together people with no actual predefined common ground, no idea of where they want to go and there needs to be some kind of objective that's set somehow. But well I think it's interesting and worthwhile stuff to explore. The Think Tank Demos a couple of years ago published something about applying open systems to the media review process. We've got media press complaints commission and we've got, you know, range of different bodies to which we're allowed to complain about the media. But if you had an open source system for that, if you had a kind of wiki style or collaborative and participative process for that, you could have a much more responsive public engagement with the media. If we could do the same thing with politics, I think that would be quite a profound thing. There was a question from down here and then there's a lot of hands up at the back so the one here. It's kind of me again because I've been to the war. I've been out there and we have done a lot of promoting free software since 2001. We have met every obstacle that you described correctly but we have done one more thing or two maybe. One is that we have installed free software on schools. When you have an installed base you can ask new questions that you couldn't ask before. Before it was kind of you should do free software. Now we have all these kind of installed machines and people are kind of not getting access to public information. It's like what we use as an example as the ministry of reform, the minister herself uses an example. It has been a surrealistic situation where people are going to use public parking lots and they can just park there with cars from one manufacturer. Because the computing language is so difficult, we need good, sane examples showing the surrealistic examples as I just told you. The other thing that has happened a couple of years ago was the national exams that you needed to use Excel spreadsheet from Microsoft and Microsoft Excel to prepare national exams in math. Then we asked the question why should we be a Microsoft customer because we're using Linux. Then a lot of people said just change the operating system. This went up to the minister of education and she said competition. It took one day after this was announced in the newspaper because we wrote a letter from six months earlier complaining. Then they begged us on the knees never to go to the newspaper again because they will do everything we told them to. We are partners now of the educational directorate that does the preparation of national exams so it should support Linux. If they are not doing it, they are out of business. We put this company that delivered Excel spreadsheet out of business. This is how we should perform. We should use regular reason, good arguments, hard work and we will prevail. This is good examples on the government can't take part in any single company's business but should provide everyone. It's about universal design, universal access especially in schools and it works. I think you are absolutely right. Certainly the first point you make about get these systems installed. Get them out there, get people using them in order to start asking questions and figure out how much they don't know about them is absolutely the first step. I was working a couple of years ago with someone who was trying to persuade public libraries to start distributing burned copies of open office for nothing. He was going to give them hundreds of copies of this thing just so long as they would be willing to be a source for people to access it. If we can jump on every opportunity to get these systems out there, that's job one. This is my point, get it installed. My other point is then you will get into all kinds of trouble. You will, I promise you that. But then they need to explain themselves why they are giving you headache and that's also a problem for them. Getting in trouble can be very creative sometimes. There was a few hands at the back there. Just first to answer the teacher's comment at the front there, I've just sat higher computing and it doesn't get any better with the higher. I think I probably failed it because I answered the right way and not the way they wanted me to. But also you said you'd like the MSPs to get involved if they can. I'm part of the Edinburgh Linux user group and there's a few others of us here today. If you'd like to set up a meeting or something, we'd be quite happy to come down to the parliament and have a chat with you. If that's something you'd be interested in. Absolutely. Thanks very much. I don't have cards with me but I'm sure you can find them. I'll find you at the end. Just drop me an email. That would be great. Okay, will be. Hi, recently there was the Scottish elections which were all e-counted. That was actually done with the proprietary system with closed source code. I was just wondering what you could do to stop spending a small fortune with this company DRS and try and use open systems insofar as we actually need computers to count. I don't think we need computers to have an open system for that. I think we need people at desks with piles of paper counting them physically. I think there's a number of areas where people just jump towards a technical solution. Sometimes simply because they can't think of anything else to spend the money on, which is really sad. We've got a very expensive system that we don't need. It actually took longer to count the votes even in the stations where the systems were working smoothly. It took longer to count them than by hand. There's no evidence that it's a higher degree of accuracy even when they work smoothly. We've seen some of them work very badly indeed. We should just junk them. Thank you. Did your questions to Parliament involve asking how much open or free software was currently in use? I think organisations can often underestimate how much software of this type they're using. When they do realise what's already installed and working very well for them, that brings people together to increase that usage. I didn't ask that specifically. I asked about what the executive's policy was and also the corporate body. The corporate body is the body that runs Parliament as an institution, the executive being the devolved government. I asked what each body has as policy in relation to free and open source software as opposed to proprietary systems. I asked what they spend on software licences and there was another set of questions. I should have looked this up before I came, shouldn't I? I didn't get particularly useful information back again and I suspect if I had asked how much is out there, I would have got a stock answer like this information is not held centrally. But I could maybe give it a go. Right, thanks. Was there somebody else? There was certainly somebody this side, I think. All right, OK. Organisations using Wikipedia for policy decisions. I find that rather disturbing. But yeah, I was wondering, surely the easiest thing to say is money talks. So why not say, look, we can save this amount we could put it towards hospitals, blah, blah, blah. Surely a couple of high profile headlines and papers would get the ball rolling quite nicely. Yeah, I mean, I guess the downside of that or the danger with that is that you end up with, you know, the cost of the Parliament building, for example, spiralled way out of control, but the original estimate was an estimate for a completely different building. If you start off by saying we're going to save this much money, but you end up only applying free software in some circumstances and not others, or you don't account for the running costs and the management costs or whatever. I mean, I think that you can get better just raw value for money, a lot of the time with free or open source software. But that's not the overriding reason for me why we should be using it. I think the freedom is more important than the free-ness. And I think we've got to win that argument before we're going to persuade people that they should adopt it. Yeah, a couple here. In the state of Massachusetts in the U.S., they passed a law, I want to say a year or two ago, about using open document format for their documents for government purposes. And recently some states in the U.S. have also tried to pass similar bills. Is the Scottish Parliament having anything like that that's similar? The situation's got better in the last few years. It used to be that there were quite a few documents that would be put out in complex Word documents that didn't display properly in other packages and so on. That's got better. I wouldn't say that they're perfect, but there's less of that now than there was. I've been told that I should be winding up in some amount of time. I couldn't quite see the number. 15 minutes? All right, okay. We're okay, we're okay. There was a question behind there. How much do you think it's about end-user education, like the MPs that you work with and people in Parliament that just, since you say open source, it's just an alien concept to them? An example being that Iron Ridge did a presentation to a Scottish section of the government for a new website and we said we'd do it in an open source content management system that's very popular and ticked all the boxes. And they were just scared off by the fact that it was open source and eventually they went down the other route of proprietary software where I thought, you know, that's my taxpayer's money. I'd rather be spent on open source. Absolutely. That shouldn't have happened even in terms of current policy. Current government policy does allow open source products to be considered on an equal basis. And I think a lot of the time what you get is, as you say, a kind of instinctive recoil. Simply out of, don't know what that means, not familiar with it. You know, go back to something that's kind of familiar and safe. I think having people use, even just a browser, even just people use on a daily basis a different browser and learn that browsing the internet does not equal using internet explorer. Just having people see that a piece of software that they're going to use on a daily basis is reliable, is often better, is no more confusing or puzzling or difficult. Getting people into that daily habit and seeing that it's real software, it really works and it's not scary. If we can do that, and again, as the colleague down at the front here said, it's just about getting stuff installed. And even if we could get schools to install two or three different browsers and discuss what it means to use them differently and why they're different, that would be a start. There was a hand up at the back there and then down here. Perhaps you or someone else can give me some more information. But as I was looking, I saw that there was a university consortium in this area of the world that made an advanced study and the conclusion was that Microsoft has 75,000 programmers. And if they just put those 75,000 programmers in a catch up mode trying to duplicate what Linux now has, it would take them eight years just to get to where we are in 2007. I would like to know more details about that. I'm sure that that would probably help to have a free open source software day at the parliament. Thank you. Having that kind of event in parliament would certainly help. I'm not familiar with the research that you're talking about there, but I can readily believe it. I think it's an indicator of the power of collaboration and cooperation. That would not have been the expectation when people started talking about I want to create a completely different operating system from scratch and it's not going to be based on anybody making money. I think people would have said, you'll never do that. That will take you decades just to get started. And what we've got now is a situation that's turned those expectations on their head. There was one down here, I think. The company that I work for, we've actually gone in for tenders for government business and so on. And indeed we've won quite a few. There was the GLA London Elect site and that kind of thing, which there were lots and lots of consortium. Most of them are based on proprietary software, which we're tendering and we won the tender because we happen to bring a good guy who answered all the questions well. But it isn't uphill struggle because if I'm being frank, of all the sectors that I meet people involved in computing and IT, the most kind of conservative and, dare I say it, frankly just unintelligent are in government and quasi-government organisations. I guess it's because no self-respecting geek thinks that he wants to go and work for a local council or something. So I have to warn you that the dros that you meet is, and it sounds humorous, but actually that's a big problem. You're not getting that many good quality people in your government IT infrastructure and their conservatism and their fear is what keeps them going back to daddy basically. And frankly until that changes, I don't think you're going to get the changes that you want. You may be right. I'd like to point out at this point that I'm not in government. You're probably using stronger language than I would. I think that there are some people that I've met who are working in the public sector and also in the voluntary sector providing public services who are more open to innovation. And as more public services are being provided by the voluntary sector by smaller organisations, by different kinds of people who are drawn from different experience, different backgrounds and so on, I hope that there'll be more openness to innovation. So I think we've got to try and get the best outcome that we can rather than say that we can't do anything in the prior. You're correct about that. I think the voluntary sector is actually very different from the kind of the state let's go and use EDS and Microsoft sort of people because of course they can't. They have to say we are actually using the money we've received from the charity or whatever responsibly and they're beginning to get that point. Absolutely, absolutely. And as I say, more public services are being delivered now and are going to be delivered in the future through the voluntary sector, through organisations which perhaps don't carry that civil service culture or civil service mentality. So maybe that's an opportunity. Any more questions? One up at the back there. You were arguing that software that's paid for by the taxpayers should be open to use by the taxpayers and that's fine but there's a parallel argument about other types of information that's produced by the taxpayers money for instance maps or weather data or various kinds of statistics that's gathered by the government. In the US there is normally data that is produced by the government is not covered by copyright. I'm not sure what the state is in the UK or Scotland but normally you don't have that type of legislation. So what are your thoughts on that? It does vary from different parts of the public sector to different parts of different levels of government as well. I've come up against a similar problem with maps myself and political parties do. Political parties like to have maps of the areas that they want to canvas. So the door knocking and the canvassing can be up to date and taking kind of changes. And sometimes you find that yes you're allowed to have the map but you're not allowed to use it for XYZ purposes. So you have to go in saying I'm going to use it for something else completely. That's a kind of silly example that's the sort of thing that simply shouldn't happen but it does vary from different levels of government. The Scottish Parliament I noticed just about a week ten days ago announced that it was having a consultation on its copyright policy. And hopefully I'll be able to try and nudge them in the right direction in terms of information that Parliament produces. Not just the official records of parliamentary business are all public but there are constraints over. The yellow one says five minutes I think. Sorry about that. There are constraints over what we're allowed to use the video. You can get the streaming video from parliamentary business on the Parliament website. If you use Linux you can download it pretty easily. If you use Windows you can't which is nice. Or at least I haven't found a Windows program that will do it. There probably is one out there isn't there. But there are constraints over what you're allowed to use that video for. And there shouldn't be those kind of constraints. I should be able to use video of myself saying making speeches in the chamber for pretty much any reason, any purpose. I can't think of any reason to restrain that at all. And people should be able to copy and share that information as well because it's public debate and it should be public record. Hello. If I remember rightly from the last election the Greens have policies on community-led government. And I was wondering to what extent in your experience of community-led Linux has shaped those policies. I think there is a strong parallel. I think for me one of the things that the free software movement represents is something which couldn't have been created by a political movement. It was created for a political purpose and someone designed a movement like that and said this is what it's going to achieve. Organically it grew from individuals. But it somewhere sits between the slightly left libertarian ideas that do sit in the Green Party's tradition. But also the individualist tradition which at the moment is kind of co-opted by the political right. A collaborative process is very much about a corporate source and a corporate set of controls about what a product can be used for. It's about what individuals can contribute, what they can get out of it. But it's not about individual ownership and possession and the kind of materialistic individualism which has characterised politics in the last 20 or 30 years in this country certainly. So it kind of sits somewhere between the left and the right concepts of individualism and individual libertarianism for me personally anyway. Does that make any sense or am I rambling? Okay. I think there's probably about time for one more question. We're running out of time but there's one at the back there. I was wondering if you could make a start by hiring researchers who are friendly to the cause rather than simply hiring people that have been in the party for the longest amount of time or have contributed the most money or whatever. Very few people have contributed very much to the Green Party at all but that's one of our problems. For all of our paid positions we do publicly advertise and one of the things that I've found really valuable about that is that we do bring in new people who end up volunteering for the party after they started working for us in the parliamentary group. There's a range to be honest. I mean some MSPs will hire their husband or their wife or their son or their brother or whatever. Others are much more kind of equal ops about the whole thing and do a full public recruitment process. It's possible that a new set of roles will come in about that because the parliament wants to act as the employer for MSPs staff even though MSPs would recruit. The parliament would be the employer and it would make sure that they got treated a lot better. Some research would get treated pretty badly by their employers. If that was to happen then you might have a single policy on recruitment processes but politicians like anybody else are a range, a broad range of people, some of them very hard working, very disciplined and very committed to their principles and others maybe less so it's just a group of human beings like any other group. I hope some of this has been vaguely interesting. It's probably been a bit different from what you've been hearing for the rest of the day. I hope it's been relevant to what you've been hearing in the rest of the day and if you do want to get in touch and help me take forward my thoughts about how we try and influence government, how we try and influence the wider public sector to be a little better on this. We're right on the button with the red piece of paper saying time up so that's very good. Thanks very much for your questions and for your time.