GOSCON AWARDS for Open Business Use in Government Nominations are now being accepted for the 2009 Excellence Awards for Open Source Business Use in Government.
It’s true. After five years of operation of the Government Open Source Conference, we’re looking forward to recognizing government employees who have made significant accomplishments in the application of Open Source Technology to meet government business or mission requirements.
To nominate a government employee or project, visit www.goscon.org/awards for information and an on-line submission form. Deadline is Friday Oct 23 2009.
Last winter I received a request from the US Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Policy to come Charleston and meet with a group of innovative law enforcement execs. If you belong to the public safety community or are interested in how governments are making collaboratives work, a copy of my presentation is viewable on google from this link:
Matsue City is a beautiful and remote city located in the Shimane Prefecture of Japan. The region has drawn national recognition for the Matsue “Ruby City” project, a highly innovative initiative to promote open source software through a collaborative partnership created by local industry, academia and government.
I was very fortunate to have been invited to participate in a number of events in early February to help share what the state of Oregon, industry, government and the Open Source Lab (OSL) has learned though its years in supporting the growth of the Open Source Community. The visit included meetings with Shimane University’s President Honda; Matsue’s mayor; Shimane Prefecture’s governor; keynoting at a seminar for industry and government; addressing the 37th Open Source Salon of the Open Source Software Society Shimane; spending time with colleagues from Japan’s IPA Open Source Lab (their national referendum on OSS); National Applied Communication Labs and Mr. Inoue and Matz; touring historic and scenic sights in Matsue – a beautiful blend of historic and traditional architecture and modern as well – and enjoying many wonderful meals courtesy of my hosts.
Many thanks especially go to Mr. Doi from the City of Matuse, to Mr. Noda of Shimane University, and especially to Mr. Tansho my host and translator – and of course to Shimane University which sponsored my visit. The dedication of these three individuals to this project is amazing as is the commitment of everyone I met from all sectors – education, private industry and government.
BTW plans are underway for a “Ruby for Business” conference fall of 2009 in Matsue, drop a line if you are intersted in talking with the organizers.
I just returned from Matsue, Japan, also known famously as “Ruby City” after the programming language whose inventor lives there.
During my stay there I provided the keynote for a Shimane University-sponsored seminar on Open Source Software, Industry and Academic collaboration. It was an honor to represent some of the institutions and groups in Oregon, the successes and challenges we’ve faced in using, promoting, developing and supporting a full open eco-system in our somewhat unique state. Key to my message and encouragement to participants from all sectors of their region was this; if you want to demonstrate the value of open source to non-technical constituencies, identify and collaborate on a project with clear public benefit.
One of the panelists was Mr. Hatta from Japan’s Information-Technology Promotion Agency’s (IPA). He told me later he changed his presentation as I spoke, struck by the proposition of public benefit projects. I’ll ask for his presentation and share it here soon.
His wrap-up recommendation: create a public benefit project and the suggestion that project might be an Open Source Election system, apparently an idea with universal appeal/compelling need.
I’ll come back soon to sharing more about my travels to Matsue City, their impressive open source software initiative, the investment their government has made, and the outstanding collaboration between the university, industry and public sectors.
I’d also be remiss in my public benefit duties if I did not provide a final plug for the February 18th Open Source Digital Voting Foundation’s (OSDV.org) “TrustTheVote” intro in Portland, Oregon (see prior post for agenda). I’m looking forward to introducing them to my colleagues in Japan soon, and looking forward to hearing from Gregory Miller and John Sebes, the co-founders, even sooner.
I’m taking a trip to Matsue between March 8th and March 14th 2009.
Lecture, participate in Shimane University’Project: “Stabilization and Business Models for Open Source Software through the Cooperation of Industry, Government, Academia, and the Software Developers’ Community”
I’ve had numerous calls recently asking me about the (to simplify) open source version of PBX software, Asterisk. Several years ago the State of Oregon extensively tested and deployed an Asterisk server, then later developed several cost-effective applications on the platform which their agency customer could not have otherwise afforded. They wrote up a brief case study on their experience, so I thought I’d post it here for sharing. Kudos to the Department of Administrative Services, Data and Video Services for being ahead of their time on this one. Today, numerous governmental agencies have deployed Asterisk. Here in Oregon, that includes the Portland Metropolitan Service District.
One of the local government stories (success and challenge) we’d hoped to see at GOSCON this year was from the City of Northglenn, Colorado. Christine Martinez, formerly a systems analyst there, can’t join us this year but she was kind enough to share her slide set on that city’s extensive use of open source software which she presented last year at the 2007 National Association of Government Webmasters Conference held in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
The project list covered in the presentation includes:
Joomla! CMS (and custom supporting applications)
PHPSurveyor
WebDocs
PHPLists
NGDIS (Northglenn Document Imaging System)
Police Bulletin Board
It’s no secret I’m a big fan of E-Government. Northglenn’s out-the-box thinking netted web services to city employees that they could use without the IT department’s intervention. And how many small towns have a document imaging system? If you’re living in a small town, government transparency by way of the Internet depends on the webmaster’s work load and vacation schedule. Good Content Management Systems (CMS) make it easy for non-technical public service employees to share what’s up at your seat of government. Impressive and resourceful.
Open eGov Wins a second award, returns to GOSCON to tell story and share software
One of government’s biggest champions of the enthusiastic yet reasoned use of open source software is Andy Stein, IT director, City of Newport News Virginia. Last year he and his team won a prestigious award for the Plone CMS based E-Government platform they developed for the city then shared. More recently the project was awarded the 2008 Digital Government Achievement Award in the Government to Government category (read their press release on the Center’s web site).
All in all it was a good day for Virginia which received two 2008 Digital Government Achievement Awards plus a Best of the Web award for its outstanding state portal. The Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy’s e-forms initiative, the Department of Taxation’s telework initiative and the Open eGov initiative were all winners.
Is it something in the water? That’s the question I want to ask Virginia secretary of technology Aneesh Chopra when he delivers the GOSCON closing keynote this October 22 in Portland, OR. Congrats to the Commonwealth of VA and thanks for your substantive contributions to the Government Open Source Conference.
LinuxToday’s editor and contributor to many technical publications, Brian Proffitt covered GOSCON 2007 and continues to share pearls from his time with presenters and attendees. He has a gift for ferreting out the stories beyond the usual conference din. His original story can be found at serverwatch.com, I’m sharing the more intriguing portion here of his take on the use of Linux vs. Unix and Sun Solaris in the government environment based on conversations with some of the managers attending the conference in Portland, Oregon. October 24, 2007
Enterprise Unix Roundup: Government Vibes, A New OS X
By Brian Proffitt
In an effort to actually live up to the proud name of Enterprise Unix Roundup, I thought this column would actually try to be a roundup.
Part of the rationale for such a structure this week is due to my recent return from Portland, having attended the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON). No official Unix news came out of GOSCON, although there was a brief exchange during a keynote of the conference that gave me a brief glimpse into what the public sector might be thinking in terms of Unix, Linux and Windows deployments. Read the rest of this entry »
Some day I will join the ranks of diligent bloggers and post here with reasonable frequency. In the mean time, my writing efforts all flow to my favorite project, Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON). It’s coming up in just two weeks in Portland. The process of creating this hand-crafted event gives me plenty to share, but leaves little time to share it other than pushing session descriptions onto the conference web site. It puts me in touch with people all over the world that are doing interesting, compelling, innovative things that I think should hear about. Today, I’ll comment on the conference itself.
Community Building. OSL was created to support the open source community, consistent with the university’s generalized mission to build community. I joined OSL to extend that mission into the public sector. I think the opportunity for state and local government is tremendous, and providing education at the management level key to reasonable and successful deployment of OSS.
Platform for Collaboration: State and local governments have a desire to collaborate. This is not an easy task in the government environment but there are plenty of agencies ready to take it on if made less painful. We’re a long way from government 2.0, but we need to learn from every successful AND unsuccessful project and GOSCON is a place for these connections to take place, at the podium and in the hallways.
Open IT EcoSystem Building aka Market Building: Government will never go it alone on software acquisition, deployment, training, maintenance and support. Vendors who are uncomfortable with the idea that they may loose market share in the government space and react by spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about OSS are worrying about the wrong problem. When we gathered to create the first GOSCON in 2005, one state agency CIO asked me “How will (insert large traditional national IT consulting firm here) support me if we move to Open Source development and applications?” In 2006, the large national traditional IT consulting firm sent two representatives to attend, listen and learn (and so did medium size firms, application providers, small consultants – the list goes on). This year the registration list expands to include silicon valley start-ups and others that want to be part of the conversation.
How do we do it? With a lot of help from my friends, and their friends too. More on that tomorrow.
