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!)

This un-conference is about convening a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, NGOs, wonks & activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public.

Here’s their focus:

1) Technology development for enhancing government transparency

2) Community building for the transparency in government tribe

3) Talks, workshops and coding sessions to better equip technologists with the skills needed to deliver an Open Government.

I’ll be one of the less technical folks there, but hope to contribute to #2 above, and share what I know from my walk in government shoes.

Although the event filled up some time ago, I encourage you to sign up for their list for the next one (more than likely) or consider a small sponsorship.  The event wiki can be found at https://barcamp.pbwiki.com/TransparencyCamp.

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

I’ve recently been asked to join as an adviser to the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation.  In my view, this is one of the most important open source projects around for the US system of democracy.  I was deeply impressed by their open standards specification,  public trust approach and the work they’ve done thus far – with little public fan fare – to establish the non-partisan initiative which has become known as “TrustTheVote!”.

Recognizing a large, active OSS community exists in Oregon, the OSDV is coming to Portland on February 18th to introduce their project.  Although the meeting content is designed for a technical audience, the project overview and progress-to-date would be of interest to many.

Here’s a description of the event.  You can also view details including a map to the event at Portland’s CubeSpace on Yahoo or Calagator.  If you’re in the area, hope to see you there!

TrustTheVote! intro in Portland, Oregon, Feb 18, 2009

Discover this imperative “public digital works project” of the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation. The OSDV Foundation is a Silicon Valley based public benefits corporation whose mission is to work to restore trust in how America votes through the design, development, and demonstration of open source digital voting technology.

Join us to learn details about the “TrustTheVote Project,” a well funded non-profit effort which has been under the radar for 2 years. The OSDV Foundation is now raising public awareness, and expanding efforts including a planned development center in Portland, Oregon.

Our guests are two executives of the Foundation including its Chief Technology Officer. Their presentation will:

• Introduce the project, its motivation, founding, and development efforts to date;
• Walk through the TrustTheVote technology road map and review major projects underway;
• Discuss development philosophies and approaches including experience-driven design and test-driven agile development;
• Review opportunities for systems architects, software developers, SDQA/test specialists, and user experience designers;
• Cover plans to expand the volunteer developer teams, future opportunities for senior members of technical staff, and opportunities for you to get involved.

Presenters:
Gregory Miller, Chief Development Officer
E. John Sebes, Chief Technology Officer

event on: Yahoo or Calagator

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’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.

Options

Disable

Get Free Shots

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.

• OSS adoption and use is moving beyond tools and infrastructure and up the stack
• More vendors are becoming involved in providing services and support, key to successful government IT strategies (proprietary or open source)
• And something I’ve been saying for four years; the greatest value to governments lies in the model itself, creating collaborative communities with common program missions and business requirements.

"CGI Announces Open Source Software to Support EPA’s National Environmental Information Exchange Network

FAIRFAX, VA, June 3 — CGI Federal, Inc., a wholly-owned U.S. operating subsidiary of CGI Group Inc. (NYSE: GIB; TSX: GIB.A), today announced the release of the first Open Source Node 2.0 software product to be available to EPA data exchange partners on the National Environmental Information Exchange Network (Exchange Network). The CGI Node 2.0 software is offered to Exchange Network partners and other interested members of the environmental community to give them capabilities to publish, share, and gain access to environmental data for improved decision making.

The National Environmental Information Exchange Network includes EPA’s Central Data Exchange (CDX), the point of entry for Agency environmental data exchanges. Together, CDX and the Exchange Network partners’ nodes are the infrastructure that enable efforts to collect, share and monitor the environmental data used to assess the impact of global warming, monitor the safety of our water supplies, gather geographic information on sources of pollution, and encourage overall excellence in the study and stewardship of our environment.

CGI Node 2.0 represents an expansion of this community to allow sharing across federal, state, commercial and citizen boundaries related to software development and technological innovation. It allows users to collaborate, publish, and discover environmental information and services across disparate systems. The node’s dashboard allows for quick and easy reporting, scheduling, and administration capabilities.

"Flexible and rapid data exchange capabilities are critical to responding to environmental challenges faced by government agencies and their trading partners," said Melanie Morris, Chief of Data Integration Division, Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. "Establishing the building blocks of an Open Source community that supports environmental collaboration and decision making will help stakeholders leverage their investments and capitalize on shared business drivers."

CGI Vice President Kenyon Wells added: "CGI is proud of our long history in helping EPA meet its mission of protecting the environment. Our open source software is the latest example of how CGI invests in the success of its clients and will allow Exchange Network partners to save money while promoting standardization for the sharing of important environmental data."

CGI will be hosting a Webinar to demonstrate the CGI Node 2.0 on June 4th. For more information about this event or about the Node product please refer to the CGI Environmental Practice Website: www.cgi.com/environment

Source: CGI GROUP INC. CONTACT: Peter Cutler, Director, Communications, (703) 227-6933, peter.cutler@cgifederal.com"

In an effort to actually live up to the proud name of Enterprise Unix Roundup, I thought this column would actually try to be a roundup.

Part of the rationale for such a structure this week is due to my recent return from Portland, having attended the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON). No official Unix news came out of GOSCON, although there was a brief exchange during a keynote of the conference that gave me a brief glimpse into what the public sector might be thinking in terms of Unix, Linux and Windows deployments.

After Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin spoke on the benefits of open standards, Linux and government, an audience member asked him a question about where he thought Solaris might fit in public IT, given its recent shift to open source. The mere asking of the question was telling to me, since it indicates Sun’s push to get Solaris recognized as more of a commodity-based piece of software may indeed be working.

Of course, Zemlin’s answer was equally telling, albeit not surprising. He replied that in his view, Solaris and the rest of the Unixes were, while excellent operating systems, going to be relegated to merely filling niche operations in businesses. The real growth and competition would be between Linux and Windows from now on. Zemlin seems to be buying into the notion Gartner analyst George Weiss recently put forth: There will be no more new Unix applications developed after 2009. His specific remarks about Solaris may not get him a Christmas card from former colleague (as CTO of the Linux Foundation) Ian Murdock. Murdock, you remember, now works for Sun Microsystems on Solaris.

As I’ve said before, I am not willing to concede Unix is on the way to that great hard drive in the sky. I talked with a number of other attendees at the conference to make sure the sole question about Solaris wasn’t a fluke, and it does not seem to be the case. Many of the mid- to upper-level government IT managers remain very intrigued by Solaris over Linux because Linux did not always meet their standards requirements, and Solaris could — especially in the vendor support department. Of course, such statements are anecdotal, so take them as such.

…..

http://www.serverwatch.com/eur/article.php/3706976