(August 27th, 2007)

Australia’s Open Source Initative Matures

Posted by Deborah Bryant in National Government.

CIO Magazine has noted Australia’s maturity in the Open Source Software in government, interviewing Gartner Research’s leading OSS analyst for that sector – Andrea DiMaio – in an article entitled “Public Sector Warms to Open Source“. It’s been over two years since the country released its “Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies”.

Sidebar: DiMaio will keynote at GOSCON (small shameless plug for an outstanding event) on October 16, 2007 in Portland, Oregon. We can expect to hear more on Australia’s leading effort, as well as the general challenges agencies face in adoption OSS (on the later, read: update internal skill sets).  To his point, GOSCON will host a supplemental workshop on Open Source Policy Development.

From the CIO article:

“Public sector and government organizations around the world are adopting increasingly mature open-source products, with Australia at the front of the trend.

And while Gartner recently warned governments of all stripes about the need for a greater focus on establishing OSS policies, the Australian government is confident it has the matter well in hand.

A recent Gartner survey found what it called “a remarkable lack of maturity” in establishing OSS policies in public-sector organizations. It warned while most clients had significant deployments of open source, there was a dearth of formal and comprehensive policies covering aspects such as inventory, procurement, vendor assessment and selection, OSS license risk assessment and management, liability limitation, and participation in OSS communities.” Read the rest of this entry »

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(August 24th, 2007)

The City of Newport News, Virginia “Open eGov” project merged with PloneGov

Posted by Deborah Bryant in Local Government, Projects.

Andy Stein, IT Director for the City of Newport News, Virgina, shared the news of NN’s recently released eGov platform which has now joined PloneGov.  In his email today to colleagues Andy related…

“Open eGov is our initiative to create a collaboration of multiple local governments that share in the cost of software enhancements and operations for eGovernment functionality. By joining PloneGov, we merge with an existing project which has a membership of about 55 government organizations from multiple countries, all using the same technology and interested in collaboration.

Many of you already converted to a Content Management System. If not, then PloneGov may be an excellent alternative for you.

You may know about smaller organizations in your region which may be interested in this approach. I would appreciate you forwarding this note to the peer groups in your region.

The technology we use is very scalable and there is a strong base of large organizations running it. However the larger organizations seem to be favoring solutions that come from tier 1 vendors, which is the reason I am targeting medium size localities and smaller.”

Press Releases Available:

“The City of Newport News, Virginia “Open eGov” project merged with PloneGov “

Corresponding news item published on the PloneGov site

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