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.
I’m working on following up with a number of requests for information post-GOSCON. Always number one on my list; agencies looking to determine if/how they might jump in to using open source software development methodology to produce government-specific applications. These applications are typically costly since the market for such is limited. Developing the same vertical application for all Secretaries of State’s office, for example, is still just fifty customers and makes for a small pool to amortize the cost of commercial development.
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:
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.
It’s Day One of GOSCON and we’re about to start our distributed discussion “Global Dialogue on the Impact of Open Source Software in Transforming Government”. Marcos Vinicius Ferreira Mazoni shared these comments on the sustained government initiative in Brazil to use open source and open standards – proprietary software not excluded. Comments include his views the value of collaboration and knowledge- Read the rest of this entry »
International Government Open Source Dignitaries Lead Discussion
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
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 Read the rest of this entry »
It’s that time of year….I’m all about delivering a quality Government Open Source Conference in Portland in just a few weeks.
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.
Objective data, benchmarks and other numeric tangibles have been difficult to come by when discussing the update of open source software in Government. Much analysis remains the domain of corporate-sponsored reports, so its always interesting to see published indicators. I talk to agencies – in the US and abroad – every day that use open source software so anecdotal evidence abounds. But numbers, of course, are better.
Although a press release certainly isn’t a peer-reviewed paper, it does reflect and validate what us government folks have known for some time; government agencies have been earlier-than-usual adopter of open source and are using it extensively. This according to the Open Source Census project. Their initial Read the rest of this entry »
