Government Sites Should Run Free Software
Not proprietary bloatware with buzzwords to make up for the bloat:
Despite being on holiday (for quite some time now), yesterday I "Filed a Complaint With the Council" and then relayed that complaint to the relevant parties. The Manchester City Council's Web site has long been powered by Jadu, as are others. It's a proprietary piece of software that we discussed in Leicester's authorities more than a decade ago when yours truly together with the CEO of Sirius Open Source tried to sell them Drupal. I made two visits to them, but a side story is, my travel expenses were never paid back (I stopped pursuing this after a while; it's not the biggest Sirius Open Source scandal because later it turned out my colleagues and I had been defrauded).
Sadly, many City Councils (like Town Halls, in London they called it "Greater London Authority") are using proprietary software. Many use Microsoft for way too many things. It's not a uniquely British thing through. When using Drupal many of them actually use Microsoft Word and then paste text into Drupal.
"The Finnish government seems thoroughly compromised by Microsoft," one person told us. "They even have a survey trying to (and failing) to run on IIS. In this case they outsourced to a company which outsources to Microsoft and then deploys not-fit-for-purpose software imitations," said this person.
There's lots of work left to be done. In Leicester, our key problem was, bigger companies competed with us to get a Drupal contract, which was eventually granted/awarded to the company of Drupal's founder. It's a very large company.
On the bright side, I did help secure our contract with Greater London Authority, whose site (Drupal) I then spent a lot of time working on (to the point where in 2015, when I wanted to go on holiday, they needed to hire someone to cover for me; colleagues could not do what I was doing). █