What The Toot!

We here at WhatTheToot! seldom (read: almost never) praise anyone. Heck, the whole point of this website is to record the Toot stuff in the world, and to record the rants and displeasure that we have.

This post, however, is an exception. Today I am going to praise two organisation. The first being the State Secretariat Office of Penang. A few days ago, I saw another quotation which interest me. It seeks out company providing the software subscription for Lotus Note, a proprietary software. I am a self-proclaimed Open Source supporter and enthusiast, and when I saw that, I wrote an email to the State Secretariat Office:

To whom it may concern,

Hi. Firstly I applaud the Penang State Secretariat Office for the well-designed website. I have been looking at websites of different departments and agencies of Penang state and it appears to me that Penang State Secretariat Office website is one of the, if not, the best designed and user friendly website.

I also express my sincere gratitude towards the Office for your role in keeping the various departments and agencies under the responsibility of the Office functioning at its best.

I have been monitoring the tenders and quotations listed on the Penang State Portal (website) and I have recently come across the quotation aforementioned (PTMKN/2008/SH2). Specifically, it’s about the supply of Software Subscription of Lotus Notes to this Office.

I plead with you to reverse this decision. If anything, the state should move away from proprietary software and embrace open source culture. The obvious benefit would be cost, since one would not be tied to licensing cost. Next, surely the state doesn’t want to be “lock-in” to a specific software of a specific vendor.

The Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) has approve and  encourage the use of Open Source Software in public sector through the Open Source Competency Centre (OSCC). Sadly, while other states like Malacca seems to be proceeding and embracing the usage of open source software in public software very well, Penang state seems to be lagging behind.

Thus, I hope you would reconsider the quotation, and modernise the public service in Penang by the use of open source software. I am sure the licensing cost and software subscription could be better spend in other development of Penang state.

Lastly, I hope that this email will be read and I humbly await your reply. Your earliest response is very much appreciated. Thank you very much.

For more information, please see the OSCC website:
http://www.oscc.org.my/

Within 24 hours, Abdul Hamid Md Noor, the Information Technology Officer from the State Information Technology and Communication Office replied my email:

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us and we appreciate your comments on the open source software.

For your information, the State offices are currently using Lotus Notes as our collaboration tools and maximizing the usage on the same platform for our workflow and knowledge base or document base applications. Thus it’s quite abrupt at this point of time for us to reverse this decision.

However, I would like to inform you that we also adhere to MAMPU guidelines on the usage of open source software as our premier choice for any new ICT projects. FYI, most of our applications run on open source software, for example you can see that our State Portal & SUK Office portal are on open source.

That is the kind of speed in replying email I am seeking. You do not need two weeks to reply an email. Another person I would like to praise is Syed Yusof Ibrahim who is in charge of the Corporate Services of RapidPenang. I have been emailing him back and forth a lot. Typically, his reply would come in less than 24 hours, more often in the range of 5 hours.

That is the kind of efficiency I am looking for. In this modern world, you don’t actually need official, material form that comes in snail mail. Using email save cost and time. And yet, our assemblymen doesn’t seem to understand this.

I still haven’t received any reply from any of the assemblyperson other than the ones mentioned in other post. It’s been a month. That’s their efficiency. Maybe they should learn a thing or two from the public sector itself.

This shall be the last part of the experiment. We have seen the good and the bad. Now, the ugly.

Honorary Mr. Ong Khan Lee (PKR) from N24 Kebun Bunga replied to my email on May 24. I present to you the verbatim (that means word-for-word) reply from him:

Personally I m not aware of the price and tender but what I know so far that each of us will be given a laptop and printer and this was approved by the previous government!

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device via Vodafone-Celcom Mobile.

Yea, Mr. Ong Khan Lee. Personally I am not aware of the price too. If I did, I wouldn’t have asked you. And if I asked that means I hope you could find out for me, you know, since you’re an assemblyman and all and you supposedly have more power than I do.

I don’t know if the last line was automatically generated from his BlackBerry® or what. I presume it is.

What surprised me more was the use of the punctuation - the exclamation mark (!) at the end of his email. When I first received it, I do not know how to interpret it. I asked my brother and he said it was of excitement. I see it as anger.

Maybe my emails has come as an annoyance to him and he decided to say “Piss off” with the exclamation mark. I still do not know. As if that’s not enough, two days later on 27 May he sent me another email, saying this:

!

That’s all. If you don’t believe me, have a look:

Yea, he seems pretty pissed to me. A screenshot from my Gmail.

Well, I have no idea whatsoever what he was trying to present to me. Maybe it was a typing mistake or something. Or maybe even the BlackBerry® is angry with my email and decided to say piss off to me one more time.

Well, the real reason for it? We will never know. That’s another mystery of the universe.

Well, we know that 57.5% of state assemblyperson in Penang publish their email address online, and we also know that only 30.4% of that bothered to reply. We have also seen those emails from assemblymen who apparently forgot to reply my email. Now I have to give credit where credit is due and praise some assemblymen for their reply, with some quality. Not just some oh-I-don’t-know-why-don’t-you-check-the-state-treasury-office.

Honorary Mr. Ng Wei Aik (DAP) from N28 Komtar wrote this to me on May 25. He was the first to notify me of the status of the tender (ongoing) and thus the first who gave satisfactory reply. However, his tone in the email could have been better.:

The tender process is still on going. Anyone can bid the tender provided the company offer the lowest price. All these will be decided by a tender committee, which the government will not interfere its decision making. If you are interested, then you can bid for the tender.

Non of us can give you the answer on the status of tender because we are not involved in the tender committee. However, we will ensure the whole process is complying with the CAT - Competency, Accountability and Transparency principles.

Ng Wei Aik

Political Secretary to Penang Chief Minister

State Assemblyman for Komtar

Credits to him for publishing his mobile phone number in his reply, as well as 3 blogs and 1 alternate email to contact him. He also didn’t call himself a Y.B. (Honorary). Good Job!

Honorary Mr. Wong Hon Wai (DAP) from N33 Air Itam replied on May 26. His reply was swift - the first saying he will check it out, and the second letting me know of the status of the tender:

Dear (My Name),
1. As of now, No company has been awarded for the tender.

2. You are invited to observe the Dewan Negeri proceeding which will be held sometime in July.

Regards,
Wong Hon Wai

Again, professional-looking, formal and simple. Just what an email ought to be, especially from an assemblyman. Oh hey, no Y.B. too.

Honorary Mr. Chow Kon Yeow (DAP) from N26 Padang Kota replied on June 2. His reply came late, as I received it after the arbitrary two-week limit I set for them to reply the email. I figure two weeks is enough to find out about the status of the tender, and write a reply to me. Nevertheless, he took the liberty and the effort to write to me. He’s what he wrote:

Dear Sir,
The State Financial Office is still trying to source for the notebooks and printers with the required specs at the most reasonable price. TQ.

Simple, acceptable, but I don’t like using TQ as “Thank You.” That is just my perspective though. No calling oneself Y.B. too.

It just came to me that those who gave satisfactory reply didn’t address themselves as Y.B. That’s a good thing.

No toot material in this post, but I just have to do it to give credits to the 3 assemblymen. Next up, last reply from an assemblyman. Good stuff.

So, after establishing how many state assemblyperson actually publish contactable email address, and how many state assemblyperson actually replied my email, let’s now turn our attention to the content. In other words, having looked the quantity, let’s look at the quality.

In this post, we will only look at 3 assemblymen whose task management is probably a little questionable.

Honorary Mr. Tan Hock Leong (PKR) from N14 Machang Bubuk wrote this to me on May 18. To give him some credit, he was the fastest and the first to reply. He said this:

Thank you for your email for notifying me about the tender PKN/2008/T1.
Will find out the status of the tender as soon as possible.

Honorary Datuk Arif Shah Bin Haji Omar Shah (BN) from N10 Seberang Jaya said the following on May 20. To his credit, he was the second to reply, and THE ONLY assemblyman from Barisan Nasional to reply. However, his reply lacked the proper capitalisation, excessive use of “..” and “.,” (which are not even standard punctuations), and over abbreviation:

dear mr.(My Name) ., As an assemblymen we are not aware of any purchases made by the govt.pl.write to the state treasury  and hopefully they can give you the related detailsetc.. thank you and regards..yb datuk arif shah .,

Ya, Honorary Datuk Arif Shah, I know assemblymen are not aware of the purchase. That’s why I decided to notify you. And, you as the representative of the people should find it out. After all, the notebooks and printers are for the assemblymen, i.e. you. Sadly I don’t think the state treasury will reply my mail. Oh wait, the state treasury is not even in charge of this tender. The tender is from the Penang State Secretariat Office.

Honorary Mr. Jagdeep Singh Deo (DAP) from N29 Datok Keramat sent this to me on May 28. Here’s the simple reply, but probably one of the most professional-looking in terms of formatting, but again, excessive use of abbreviation:

Mr (My Name),

Thk you for your email and i will get back to  u at the the soonest possible time.

YB Jagdeep Singh Deo

I sent replies to these assemblymen reminding them about my email and the ongoing tender, hoping to get a reply. Sadly, I never did hear from them again. Perhaps in their busy schedules they have forgotten to reply me.

And for that, I recommend all of them getting some form of “To-Do List” application. But to forget to even reply a simple email, is seriously TOOT!

I was reading the news of Malaysia when I came across this news:

Immediately, I was taken aback. Wait, taken aback is probably an understatment. I was utterly shocked. Apparently taxi is public transportation.

By providing loan for individual taxi permits, one thereby increase the number of taxi. Then, something magical happens and it becomes “one of the ways to improve public transportation,” according to the Malaysian Entrepreneurial Development and Cooperative Minister Datuk Noh Omar.

I don’t know. Last time I check, public transportation refers more to buses, trains, ferries, trams et cetera - vehicles that transport a lot of people efficiently. Last time I checked, taxi is a car, seats 4 to 10 (van), and is thus one of the most inefficient mode of “public transportation” available.

The minister go one to say that there are currently 21000 taxis in Klang Valley and they want an additional 3000 taxis to “achieve a ratio of one taxi for every 500 people”. Right - putting more cars on the already congested road helps improve public transportation. Great idea from our minister. Might it be because he is the minister of Entrepreneurial Development and Cooperative, not that of Transport? (Weird, I know. There are more weird things in the Malaysian Government.)

Oh, and RM 100 million? In addition to the RM 200 million already allocated to the Public Transport Development Fund? This numbers seems to be dwarfed by the RM 2 billion cost cutting measure by the government, and the RM 13.7 billion expected to be saved from the recent reduction in subsidy.

What the Toot are those people thinking!?