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.

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

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’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.

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.