Open Source Lab Inside Story at OSBC March 18th

My executive hero and Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSU OSL) visionary Curt Pederson will be doing a talk about the OSL at this week’s Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.  If you’re going to be at OSBC drop by and thank Curt for his critical role in making the case for the creation of the OSL six years ago.  The dedicated staff and students at the OSL have created a world-class home for dozens of important open source communites like the Linux Foundation, Apache Foundation, Drupal, Gentoo Foundation, Debian Linux and many more.

Curt is a fantastic supporter of open Collaboration and loves to share the inside story of the Lab. He’ll be speaking Thursday March 18th at 4 p.m., here’s the abstract:

Inside the Open Source Lab
Curt Pederson, Vice Provost and CIO, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon

Oregon State University has emerged as one or the global leaders in the expanding “open source” movement and an integral part of a growing Oregon movement in support of community based innovation and collaboration. From Oregon resident Linus Torvalds and Governor Kulongoski to the student employees working in the Open Source Lab (OSL), we have a very unique open climate for doing leading edge research, teaching and business in Oregon and beyond.

Curt Pederson will describe Oregon State University’s role in today’s emerging “open ecosystem” and how the OSL has gone from being a spectator to having one of the largest host sites of open source applications and community Linux releases in the world. Curt will also discuss the overall ROI that OSU has obtained by using open source tools versus other commercial solutions.

Best Practices for Software Development in Government

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:

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dfj65hxm_1404gk5kchg

Community Source and Goverment Applications

I’m working on following up with a number of requests for information post-GOSCON.  Always number one on my list; agencies looking to determine if/how they might jump in to using open source software development methodology to produce government-specific applications.  These applications are typically costly since the market for such is limited.  Developing the same vertical application for all Secretaries of State’s office, for example, is still just fifty customers and makes for a small pool to amortize the cost of commercial development.

The one of the early pioneers of community source model is Dr. Brad Wheeler at Indiana University.  In late 2006 the Open Source Lab management team interviewed him by video conference to extract some advice for others on creating governance for a community source project.  I came across the resulting  debrief and thought I’d put it somewhere it could be shared more broadly.  Here it is for download:

“Community Source” Project Governance:
The Sakai Project as a Potential Reference Model for Public Sector Community Source Development

I think it’s valuable to consider that the model of shared development suggest benefits beyond sharing the cost and resulting application, such as sharing business practices and processes, knowledge base and documentation.  But I digress.  We’ll share more from the experts from our Open Government Collaboratives 2008 panel as soon as we get the conference media through GOSCON post-production.

Brazil: Joint Development Defines Free Software & Standards

It’s Day One of GOSCON and we’re about to start our distributed discussion “Global Dialogue on the Impact of Open Source Software in Transforming Government”. Marcos Vinicius Ferreira Mazoni shared these comments on the sustained government initiative in Brazil to use open source and open standards – proprietary software not excluded.  Comments include his views the value of collaboration and knowledge- Read the rest of this entry »

The World Joins the Government Open Source Conference

I’ve been talking with some colleagues over the past few months about putting together a group of folks from Washington, D.C. at the World Bank offices there for a joint session during our first ever International Open ICT Summit.  I’d met Samia Melhem when we spoke on a panel together at a Gartner Summit a few years ago and we’d been looking to find a way to collaborate since.

The World Bank GLobal ICT Dept is an amazing, distributed team who, in just a few days, have facilitated connections with Brazil, Sri Lanka, Russia, Rwanda, Senegal, in addition to D.C. and our own site in Portland Read the rest of this entry »

WebVisions 2008

I’ll be speaking and moderating a panel at the 8th annual WebVisions conference in Portland, Oregon tomorrow, Friday May 23, joined by Ward Cunningham of AboutUs.org, Brian Jamison of OpenSourcery, and Josh Bancroft of Intel. We’re doing a panel on “Why Open Source is Good for Open Content”.

Open Document Panel Video Released

During several days of last October’s Government Open Source Conference, we captured some of the sessions on video. We can’t cover them all, but I try to pick what we think will be of greatest interest after the conference is wrapped.

My first Flick Pick of the Week is the Executive Panel on Open Document Formats. It may be a bit backwards to start with the closing panel, but this topic will change soon enough so we didn’t want to sit on it too long. In fact since the panel was taped, the OpenDocument Foundation, which made news by taking a position for a different format altogether, has retired as an entity.

Participants included Adobe’s James King; IBM’s Arnaud LeHors; Microsoft’s Jason Matusow; OpenDocument Foundation’s Paul “Buck” Martin; and Sun Microsystems’ Douglas Johnson. Thanks again to the panelists. (I’m sorry Jason has been swamped but the other four panelists were able take time to weigh in on questions that had been collected from the audience but not always fully answered during the limited time at the conference.)

The GOSCON site provides the slide set, video and an open discussion thread (the latter a first for the conference web site – we shall see.) Mo info mo betta; you be the judge.

RI State Open Source Pioneer Gains Public Recognition

James Willis, Rhode Island and pioneer in the adoption of open source for his state’s agency’s government web site, recently concluded his tenure with the state. The Providence Business News covered his departure from public service in an extensive article highlighting the work for which Willis gained national recognition. The collaborative model used by this state in which RI agencies opted in to provide and share web content has strengthened its ability to provide greater transparency of information to the citizen it serves, consistent with Willis’ philosophy.  Thanks!