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.

Yesterday the White House Office of New Media announced it had migrated its legacy system for whitehouse.gov to Drupal.  Let’s be clear that this constitutes a change in plumbing – important plumbing – and not policy – but is a significant and of course highly visible sign that open source software has gone main stream.

Perhaps we can look forward to that day in the future when someone quips “No one ever got fired for implementing Drupal”.

This made yesterday a double red letter day for me and my colleagues in Oregon; an open source application was rolled out in mission-critical environment in government AND it was one the projects supported by Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSL) where I work.  Double the satisfaction.  Although I don’t talk about it much here – where I focus on government adoption of open source – our core activity at the OSL is supporting many significant open source projects through hosting, administration and development as part of our charter to build community.  We’ve been quietly at work since 2003 at this important endeavor.

There is no shortage of news coverage on this event so I won’t rehash here.  I’m focused on the upcoming Government Open Source Conference – GOSCON DC, but wanted to share with you that Drupal Association will be present at the event next week – November 5 at the Ronald Regan Building & International Trade Center.  On-line registration is still open, hope you will plan to join us if you’re in the area (or make the trip, we have colleagues as far away as Japan joining us for the day!)

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.

The June 23, 2009 Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) DC Call for Speakers is now open!

The conference will  include one day of intense GOSCON program content, exciting keynotes, lightening-round sessions, rich opportunities to network with peers.  Topics include:

• Open Source in the Enterprise
• Sustainability
• Policy
• Open Collaboration & Federal Grants
• Open Health IT- Vertical Showcase on Public Health
• Effective E-Government – Gov 2.0

Speaker Guideline and online proposal forms are availlable through the conference Call for Speakers page.

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.

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.

“I will talk about the Brazilian free software perspective and strategy.

We’ve been working with the principle of knowledge acquiring and management as strategy. Much more than with the principle of saving resources or simply comparing software prices. Our commitment is with our knowledge and our intelligence.

We are knowledge resourceful in our country and we are investing in the leading edge knowledge of how technology evolves and how this evolution impacts our information systems and the way they are built.

Our governments are heavy users of information systems. In fact we have one of the highest information systems dependency levels in the whole world. We ought to deal with multiple platforms both user and server sides. The best way for us to operate in such a scenario without become vendor-dependent is to adopt an approach that combines free software and standards.
Standards play a key role in our software development policy and free software provide us with mainstream tool to comply with those standards.

When we build free software based solutions we are promoting further knowledge and fostering our country’s building abilities. This is our relation with free software world and from this relation comes cooperation.

Free Software is as sustainable as more people cooperate sharing information and knowledge working for the same goal. Thus we are building permanent a free knowledge network in South America, Latin America, Europe, USA and whichever country that would be committed to share this will, including Africa and Oceania.

Our belief is that our knowledge grows solid and stronger as more and more people and nations players work together and more ability we will have to provide responses to our demanded needs. Through that way we will reach joint development among those players or derive development from others’ achievements. This is the more appropriate way to define free software and standards under our point of view.

Clearly we have expressive savings once we adopt free software and since it is possible to reuse open source software we are also able to accelerate our processes. But the essential part of our free software policy is the mankind ability to excel technology.

This excellence allows a non-dependent evolution process, since free software leverages all players at the topmost level of knowledge and technology with no industry driven lag or handicap but the possibility to choose their best options as good as “best” may get.

The develop nations in technology and those currently in development are all facing the same conditions to benefit from the mankind’s achievements and evolution. This is the underlying reason why we are working in Brazil for very strong adoption of free software in our “telecenters”, schools, health facilities as much as in the Brazilian e-gov as a whole.

Brazilian e-gov infrastructure is based in FOSS. This won’t forbid or refrain us to use propietary or closed software. But our government’s policy, our perspective, is to move further and further into free software world, free knowledge.

That is why is so important to take part in discussions like this. Knowing more people, users, developers we get acquainted to new solutions and partners, strengthening this win-win network.

I’d like to wish you a great GOSCON. I see this kind of dialogue and network building as of the very highest importance and look forward to hear great results from such meeting.
Have a good conference!”

Marcos Vinicius Ferreira Mazoni

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

LIVE WEBCAST: http://www.worldbank.org/edevelopment/live

Preregistration is recommended at the webcast site.

See web site for participating speakers.

Event Abstract: Government transformation and information and communication technology
dignitaries from around the world will convene in person and via video
conference for a Global Dialogue on “The Impact of Open Source Software on
Transforming Government”. The discussion will include 6 countries on five
continents, presenting a range of initiatives, opportunities and experience on a
range topics which are of critical importance to governments everywhere.  This
executive panel represents an outstanding global, non-technical  view of the
impact of Open Source Software based on their direct experience. The workshop
will explore both the business case and real-world applications for open
technology to deliver the next generation of government services. The US has
valuable experience in open source software development, at the federal, local
and academic level. The speakers assembled in Oregon will provide a very rich
base for the policy dialogue with policy makers from our client countries. This
is also a great opportunity for South-South dialogue on this important topic for
governments worldwide.

All materials will be available on the GOSCON web site.

About e-Development Thematic Group

e-Development Thematic Group is a global forum and community of professionals
interested in the role of ICT in development,  open for participation by both
World Bank staff and external clients and partners. The e-TG is hosted by Global
ICT Dept in collaboration with ISG, WBI, PREM, and other partners. Visit us at
http://www.worldbank.org/edevelopment to download materials for this and all
previous e-development seminars (over 120 since 2001). Watch some of the recent
events sponsored by the e-Development Thematic Group if you missed them (with
links to videos, slides, speaker profiles, exclusive interviews, background
materials etc.)

ICT Applications for the Public Sector http://go.worldbank.org/YLBJQROJZ0
Government Enterprise Architecture as Enabler of Public Sector Reform
http://go.worldbank.org/NNEZOTX020
Next-Generation Organizational Models for e-Government
http://go.worldbank.org/2LA3GGGEA0
India’s Emergence as a Global IT Player: The Role of NASSCOM
http://go.worldbank.org/B6DF3R8L60
The Potential of Global Sourcing of Services for Growth
http://go.worldbank.org/QFF0GUTSF0

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 Oregon on October 20.  The World Bank Global ICT Department facilitates high-quality educational global discussions at the national executive level. We are fortunate to be able to bring the fine slate of speakers at our summit into a panel discussion with government open source luminaries around the world. You’ll find the summit program on the conference web site.

I’m very excited we’re extending the reach of the conference to audiences and speakers who otherwise could not join us.  On tap:

From Portland attending Goscon:

•    Tim Ney, co-founder, Linux Greenhouse
•    Andy Stein, City of Newport News, Virginia
•    Mel McIntyre, OpenForum Europe

International Distributed Panel

•    From Brazil:  Marcos Vinicius Ferreira Mazoni
•    From Sri Lanka:  Shahani Weerawarana, PhD

•    From Washington DC:  Samia Melhem, Chair eDevelopment Thematic Group; Vivek Kundra, CIO of DC (invited)
•    From Russia: Yuri Hohlov, Chairman, Institute for Information Society Russia

We’ll also be web-casting the morning videoconference.  I’ll post when when have those details available.

If you’re in any of the countries listed, drop a line if you’d like an invitation to join the remote events.  email deb-at-osuosl-dot-org.

Many things to Oleg Petrov, Samia Melhem and Mikhail Bunchuk at the World Bank Global ICT Department for their support in making this happen.

Today I’m pretty thrilled that GOSCON has been approved by the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) for up to 4.5 contact hours of continuing education credit towards renewal of the CPHIMS credential.

Sessions approved for credit include:

• Executive Panel: Macro Trends Set the Stage for Open Source in Public Health
• Applying Open Source Methodologies to Build Public Health Software Collaboratively
• Health Atlas Ireland: Integrating data sets, GIS, statistics for health service planning, epidemiology, and incident management.
• Transitioning from Proprietary to Open Source Software: Issues and Lessons Learned through OpenELIS

GOSCON staff and volunteers have put a great deal of effort in putting together a fantastic track focusing on Open Public Health IT and we’re honored to be able to bring this extra value to our professional health care IT attendees.