As Featured on GovLoop

I spend a fair amount of time at Open Source conferences. I arrive with a government bias plus some of the great ideas that open source enables like transparency and open government. Although most panels/sessions/talks/round tables will eventually get around to the idea of education and work force training, I rarely see anyone responsible for actually delivering or receiving that training at these events.

I recently participated in POSSCON, the 3rd annual Palmetto Open Source Software Convention, hosted in South Carolina capitol city of Columbia. My experience with this community was inspiring and I think it can serve as a lesson for many.

During an executive panel discussion the moderator, Matt Asay, asked me to give an example of a government open source project. I described (in layman’s terms) the information challenge in health care, the increasing use of open-standards and open source, and its potential to improve interoperability in health care systems. I also cited the U.S. Health and Human Services’ CONNECT project as a great example of using the open source development and community methodology.

Afterward I was approached by several people who told me “We really couldn’t get what the panel was talking about until you started talking about open source and Health IT as a real example – then we got it.” Open source had little tangible value to this group until it was described in context. What is the impact to a patient when their health care records are incomplete? When their information is scattered between physicians, pharmacies, immediate care centers, rest homes, dentists offices, and hospital emergency rooms? When those systems are not designed to work together? When they understand how open source can help solve these problems, they “get it.”

Twenty students from the South Carolina Rehabilitation Center were there. Their stories were impressive. One student’s career as an LVN had ended with an accident so she was retraining in health information technology. I introduced her to a medical clinic open source entrepreneur from Atlanta that was going to need subject matter expert. Another student’s goal was to open a shelter for homeless vets. We talked about Virginia’s Veteran’s Affairs open-API community portal work – where the community of veterans help an understaffed VA get through paperwork and identify resources for returning vets. She’s now interested in doing the same thing in South Carolina. A third student with a degree in Health Informatics learned about HHS’ electronic health record project, CONNECT. Every discussion included opportunities to leverage open source, and a great desire to improve people’s lives.

The opportunity for open source in health IT is immediately apparent in every niche of that industry. I recently learned my own dentist used open source software to run his clinic! In government, we see this opportunity in the Health and Human Services’ national health information network architecture, in the National Cancer Institute’s research, the way the Social Security Administration handles sensitive health records, and the way the Veteran’s Administration runs hospitals. In a clinical setting, state and local government can expect citizens to be better served through Electronic Health Records services and improved patient care — particularly for under-served communities. The most exciting development is with Personal Health Records, consumer-based patient-centric information that will empower individuals to master their own health care (a topic for another post).

Back to the event itself; interdisciplinary and cross-industry events can be tricky to make successful but can be super-conductors for innovation. The challenge is that different audiences have varying interests and attention spans. Blended audiences, especially Columbia’s with representation from education, business, government and technology, need facilitation if interaction is the goal. POSSCON organizers did a great job of building a strong program that had something for everyone and in a format designed to converge everyone’s interests. POSSCON was a great example of how valuable face-to-face events such as this can be, even though collaboration can be happening every day virtually. Having everyone in a room is critical to inspiring, coalescing, creating and sustaining motion.

I once read that the complexity of today’s problems can only be solved by teams of people who do not naturally work together. Open source software and the kind of thinking and collaboration used to create it provides a framework to solve some of the thorniest and most interesting problems around. I think POSSCON is a wonderful example of this in bringing industry, government and education together under one well-pitched big tent.

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.

Not too long ago I attended TransparencyCamp in DC and led a discussion on how to work with government.  The session was intended for technologists and advocates. I was pleasantly

surprised to find one of the participants was a senate staffer.  After listening to much of the discussion she explained that she had worked on a bill that included a

role for open source software which eventually failed to move forward.  Her question to me:  why was that no one from the open source community stepped forward or offered to help answer questions.  Where were they?  Her question gave me pause.

Several moths later, the cavalry has arrived.  Along with the town crier, the

librarian, the community manager, the mayor and a cadre of plumbers.  The newly formed coalition is “Open Source for America”, and I’m pleased to have bee

n a par

t of its founding effort.  Read more at the association web site.

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

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.

IPA Japan Representatives

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.

TrustTheVote! intro in Portland, Oregon

Feb 18, 2009, 6:00 – 7:30 p.m.

CubeSpace, 622 SE Grand Ave, Portland

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.

Here’s the text sans the helpful graphics included in the original document:

State of Oregon
Open Source Application Use in the Enterprise

Case Study: Asterisk used to create powerful audio conferencing service
For large Agency user.

Background:

Data and Video Services (DVS), a business section within the Information Resources Management Division (IRMD) offers a wide variety of audio and video services to state agencies and other public service, educational, or other non-profit groups. DVS has just recently begun to offer an audio conferencing service with recording. The service offers users a cost effective solution for audio conferencing, Audio/video conferencing and audio session recording.

DVS has worked closely with many of the groups who are using the conferencing service to make sure that special user needs be met to satisfy their business requirements.

One of the largest subscribers to the conferencing services is the Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH). The OAH hears the contested cases of almost 80 agencies, including unemployment insurance, motor vehicle licensing, social services, licensing boards and commissions, forestry, environmental quality, agriculture, child support, and many others.

The OAH conducts an average of 500 hearings a week via audio conference. Hearings are scheduled for either 1½ or 2 hour time blocks and vary in size from 3 to 6 participants.

Data and Video Services worked with the Hearings group to develop a service that met the following criteria:
• 150 ports available on the audio bridge. The service would allow up to 150 concurrent ports to be used in any combination of conference events.
• Set up different blocks of numbers (both toll and toll-free) to allow OAH to correctly bill back to appropriate program groups.
• Match audio conference access codes to OAH case numbers.
• Bilingual IVR greeting and conference access messages.
• An automated centralized digital recording system to replace existing manual tape recordings that administrative law judges were making on site.
• Web-based recording management. The system would allow judges to start and stop recording sessions and verify that their conference was being recorded.
• An automated uploading process to transfer recordings to a designated OAH file repository. The transfer process needed to include a checksum process to verify that the file transfer was successfully accomplished and to ensure that the original hearing recording file had not been altered.
• The option of adding video endpoint to conferences in the future.

Before the advent of the automated recording and transfer process the OAH Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) conducted hearings using their PBX built-in conference features and recording using a desktop phone recording system. While functional, the system was not able to grow to match the OAH’s needs. By utilizing a combination of existing conference bridge infrastructure and open source software, DVS was able to provide a feature-rich centralized solution for minimal expense.

OAH Conference Service without automated Recording

Initially, DVS provided only audio conferencing services. The service was created by utilizing a Radvision Gateway to perform IVR and TDM-to-H.323 conversion. The conferences were—and still are—being created on Radvision ViaIP bridges.

The OAH Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) continued to manually record every conference and send the tapes in for archiving and transcription, but the judges and hearing participants called in to a scheduled DVS conference bridge to conduct the hearing

As conference use continued to grow the OAH asked DVS if it was possible to add additional features, most notable central recording, to the service. DVS investigated commercial solutions that could have offered the additional features, but was not able to find a product on the market that could integrate into the existing infrastructure cost-effectively. Consequently, DVS developed an internal solution based on the open source Asterisk voice over IP system and coupled it with existing Cisco Call Manager resources.

Building a Custom Solution

DVS engineering staff conducted an initial search to determine if there was an available commercial product that would meet the criteria for centralized recording and monitoring services and that could be easily scaled up to meet future recording demand. We were not able to find a commercial offering that was able to satisfy these criteria.

Staff then researched the open source market, and were quite pleased to find, after conducting a series of tests, that the Asterisk VOIP PBX software provided a very cost effective, flexible, and scalable solution for centralized recording and monitoring services.

Changes were also made to the media termination (TDM-to-H.323) and IVR system along with development of recording and monitoring functions via the Asterisk PBX. These changes needed to be made to accommodate growth of the audio conferencing and recording service and to provide a method to more easily address IVR message tree complexity and conference security features.
The Asterisk server is being used to create digital recordings of the hearings, to FTP completed hearing files to a designated OAH file server, and to provide Judges with the ability to start and stop recordings as well as monitor conference recording status during a conference via a web interface.

A Cisco Call Manager has replaced the Radvision gateway and is being used to provide PSTN media termination, expanded IVR functionality, and conference security.

Process Description: What’s Going On

• The Cisco Call manager provides the PSTN termination and the IVR functions (using Cisco IPCC) and the Call Manager is routing participants to the MCU via an H.323 stream.
• The Asterisk system provides the recording and file transfer features. To initiate a recording, the ALJ dials into a specified phone number that rings through the Call Manager infrastructure to the Asterisk server. The ALJ enters their conference code into the Asterisk IVR and the Asterisk server attaches a recording process to the call and connects the call back through the Call Manager to the MCU via H.323.
• When the conference ends, the Asterisk server creates a checksum and transfers the recording and the checksum files to a repository on a server on the OAH network.

DVS staff developed a web-based interface using Apache and PHP. The web interface is installed on the Asterisk server and allows the ALJ to stop, start, and verify the status of the recording. The Asterisk Manager API serves as the interface between PHP and the Asterisk server.

The communication path into and out of the Asterisk server uses a PRI interface. This particular method was chosen after testing showed that SIP traffic put too great a load on the Call Manager servers and there were unacceptable dropouts occurring with calls using the H.323 stack.

The Final Analysis

The Asterisk VOIP PBX provided the perfect solution that allowed DVS to craft a custom service that we could not find in a commercial product. Parts of the service existed but were prohibitively expensive, and other automated recording and storage features did not exist. The PBX is very robust, has performed extremely well in a production environment, and has provided the kind of flexibility and extensibility to allow DVS staff to easily develop the necessary processes and interfaces to offer a reliable, easy to use, inexpensive, centralized recording function as part of the DVS audio conferencing service.

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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.

You can view the presentation on GoogleDocs.

Open eGov

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.