Vicki E. Allums, Associate General Counsel for Intellectual Property at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) will join GOSCON this week to discuss a document released today by CENDI, a cooperative of the major Federal science, technology and information centers. The document titled “Frequently Asked Questions about Copyright and Computer Software: Issues Affecting the U.S. Government with Special Emphasis on Open Source Software”, its principal authors from Defense Information Systems Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is expected to serve as a useful resource as federal agencies increasingly adopt the use of open source software in their IT architectures.
Allums will walk attendees thought the new document including:
US Government policy guidance regarding use of Open Source Software (OSS)
Issues unique to federal agencies distributing OSS
OSS copyright licensing and contractual considerations for the US Government
Advantages and Disadvantages to federal agencies using OSS as an alternative to proprietary technologies.
Hope you can join me at GOSCON this week and not miss these important milestones in the evolution of information technology within the US 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:
Last week I posted the transcript of Marcos Vinicius Ferreira Mazoni comments addressing the International Open ICT Summit at GOSCON on the sustained government initiative in Brazil to use free open source software and open standards. Mazoni’s encouragement to increase the dialog between countries resonated with participants in Portland and those joining by video conference, representing a half dozen continents.
The original video is now available in Portuguese, with English subtitles and runs five minutes.
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:
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.
International Government Open Source Dignitaries Lead Discussion
I promised to share information on the webcast when it became available. Here it is:
Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON), Oregon State University
and the World Bank’s e-Development Thematic Group
invite you to join via live webcast a
videoconferenced Global Dialogue between Portland, Washington DC, Moscow,
Colombo, Dakar, Accra, Kigali and Brasilia on:
The Impact of Open Source Software on Transforming Government
12:00 – 3:00 pm (Washington DC time), October 20, 2008
Objective data, benchmarks and other numeric tangibles have been difficult to come by when discussing the update of open source software in Government. Much analysis remains the domain of corporate-sponsored reports, so its always interesting to see published indicators. I talk to agencies – in the US and abroad – every day that use open source software so anecdotal evidence abounds. But numbers, of course, are better.
Although a press release certainly isn’t a peer-reviewed paper, it does reflect and validate what us government folks have known for some time; government agencies have been earlier-than-usual adopter of open source and are using it extensively. This according to the Open Source Census project. Their initial Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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.
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.
Quantifying what the rest of us have known intuitively for some time; more than half US agencies have adopted some form of open source software, according to a Federal Open Source Alliance (FOSA) survey just released.
The top rationale for not adopting open-source software was organizational reluctance to change, according to the survey. This reflects my experience in early forays into the desktop arena in Oregon, as an example, where a pilot in a large agency netted positive technical and cost results, but management was dread to manage the inevitable reaction to change by personnel, trumping other benefits.
If you are interested in the base-line survey conducted by the FOSA, which is an industry partnership of HP, Intel and Red Hat, you may…
During several days of last October’s