Congratulations to New Hampshire, whose newly passed HB418 now requires the consideration of open source software, and promotes open data standards. Great work!

[If you agree with this position, please head over to the IT Shared Service Strategy IdeaScale site and upvote! Thanks!]

Open Source for America applauds OMB’s effort to increase the efficiency of the Federal IT budget through the principles of commoditization, reuse, sharing, and collaboration described in the draft IT Shared Services Policy distributed on December 8th, 2011. These principles are also the hallmarks of open source software, and while there is no explicit mention of open source in the plan at this time, we believe that there should be. We see a unique opportunity for open source to improve the effectiveness of Shared First.

“A number of barriers exist which have prevented the broader adoption of shared IT services. Lack of information sharing among the Federal agencies, budgetary restrictions, acquisition issues, and other factors have all contributed to a culture in which proprietary, specialized systems are the norm.”

We could not agree more. We believe that OMB should explicitly mention open source as a recommended method for overcoming these barriers. Open source software itself, of course, can reduce costs and ease acquisition challenges. We can assume that many agencies will naturally use open source software as part of their Shared First implementation.

Embracing the open source approach, though, and using it to encourage sharing between agencies, departments, other governments, and the general public is the purest expression of the goals of the Shared First policy. Open source excels at the Shared First Design Goals, including visibility, commoditization, reusability, extensibility, and standardization, and we believe it should be actively and explicitly encouraged by the policy.

Much of the draft is concerned with the sharing of existing infrastructure, and is in this way very similar to the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative. As the scope of the Shared First policy is much broader than the FDCCI, and concerns itself with LoB information systems and applications, we would like OMB to consider expanding the scope of the mandate to include the sharing of development resources, and not just their ongoing operations and maintenance.

As the policy encourages agencies to “move up the stack,” and share ever-more complex layers of their information systems, agencies will need to perform more customization to meet their specific mission needs. If they were to use proprietary commercial offerings or systems developed for just one agency, this can become very difficult and very expensive.

If agencies were to instead employ open source software, or better still: share their taxpayer-funded software under an open source license, customization would become easier, and the need for customization would be reduced, owing to the natural modularity of open source projects.

In the process, agencies would be making themselves available to contributions and improvements from their partner agencies as well as state and local governments who also have a use for that same software. Certainly, it is possible to share complex application software amongst agencies without open source software. We believe, however, that releasing software under an open source license can simplify this process, and simultaneously encourage sharing among other state and local governments, and the private sector as well. This approach has already been successful at NASA and the National Institutes for Health. We see no reason why other agencies cannot realize the same benefits.

“Open source is… the most concrete form of civic participation.”

— Macon Phillips, White House New Media Director

An excellent example of this is the effort currently underway at the EPA to develop a shared management system for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses, one of the goals of the President’s National Action Plan under the Open Government Initiative. Almost as soon as the FOIA project was announced, it became clear that many citizens, state and local governments were interested in developing this platform alongside the EPA.

Should this project succeed, there would be a single, common platform for handling FOIA responses that would be freely available to the 93 agencies required to perform this task. Rather than 93 purpose-built systems, agencies could take advantage of each other’s innovation, the innovation of the private sector, and the innovation of thousands of state, local, municipal, and tribal governments who have their own Freedom of Information requirements.

Unlike working with proprietary FOI software, the number of agency-specific customizations would be drastically reduced, and since customizations can be contributed back to the main project, the ongoing maintenance burden of these customizations would be reduced, as well.

This kind of inter-, intra-, and extra-agency collaboration using the open source model is already finding success throughout the government, including the Veterans’ Administration Open Source VistA program, the National Security Agency’s SELinux project, and the OMB’s own data.gov.

It’s not difficult to imagine that these projects can encourage the growth of small businesses specializing in the implementation and maintenance of this software. Incorporating these stakeholders would bring to bear on the EPA’s FOIA platform far more development and testing resources than the EPA could muster on its own. Because the software assets have been commoditized, the EPA and other agencies would no longer be beholden to a single vendor for its FOIA software. This is the kind of relationship that OMB would like with its software assets, and this is precisely the kind of collaboration and commoditization that the current Shared First policy encourages. This is why we believe that the policy should make the role of open source explicit.

Open source software is particularly useful when the Federal government mandates action by state governments. The New York State Office of Temporary Disability Assistance has had great success in sharing open source eligibility logic with its counterparts in other states, allowing them all to share the burden of implementing CMS eligibility requirements. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has employed open source software to encourage the adoption of its CONNECT standards for electronic health records. Without open source, these efforts would rely on potentially expensive proprietary software, which would have to be either unfunded or subsidized by the Federal partner to encourage adoption of their mandates. Instead, these organizations can now work collaboratively and transparently to solve their common missions.

Releasing agency software as open source has other benefits, as well. One of the primary concerns of the draft policy is to encourage visibility: agencies cannot share with each other if they do not know what’s being shared. The open source community has largely solved this discoverability problem through tools like sourceforge.net and github.com, both of which may be used, free of cost, by Federal staff and the public.

Open Source for America is excited by this renewed focus on agency collaboration and transparency. We strongly support the Shared First policy, and believe that it is one of the best tools available to meet agencies’ current challenges. We look forward to working together with OMB and the implementing agencies to make the policy successful. We also believe that by encouraging agencies to open source their software, and to share that software with each other, we can together ensure that agencies are putting their existing budgets to their best and highest use.

As part of the Open Government Partnership, the US Government’s National Action Plan was released and the White House asked for input from the public on how citizen participation could be improved, facilitated, and measured. Here is OSFA’s response, which we submitted on January 3rd, 2012.

Open Source for America (OSFA) appreciates this opportunity to comment on the Open Government National Action Plan. OSFA was formed in 2009 to advocate for the use of open source software and the open source development process in the US Government. OSFA sees the Open Government Initiative as a unique opportunity to institutionalize the use of these tools to further to goals of transparency, collaboration, and participation &emdash; values which are inherent to the open source process itself. More information on OSFA can be found at http://www.opensourceforamerica.org.

Below, we focus our attention on one of the questions posed in the blog notice: What are the most effective forms of technology and web tools to encourage public participation, engage with the private sector/non-profit and academic communities, and provide the public with greater and more meaningful opportunities to influence agencies’ plans?

OSFA stands ready via its leadership and membership to work collaboratively to achieve the goals of the Action Plan and help identify Open Source tools that can assist in the work of the Action Plan.

Participation in Open Government Plans can take many forms, and be useful at different stages of the consultative process. This should be reflected in any system of measurement.

As a general matter, however, the forms of technology and web tools should be rooted in the open source development model and rely on open standards to encourage the widest participation and broadest utilization. In many respects, the work and progress of the Open Innovation agenda is relevant to achieving the goals of the National Action Plan.

This approach has a number of important collateral benefits for government: it encourages an on-going, cohesive community that wants to improve the technology and integrate user experience. It fosters a highly engaged constituency (vs a specific regimented approach) which becomes part of the process by developing new tools, modifying tools and the reuse of content and data which is produced through the consultation.

Based on our assessment of open government initiatives around the world to date, open government thrives where citizen interest is met with public sector support, and accelerates when open source innovation is a central core tenet of the policy. Open government initiatives and open source innovation share many core values , including: transparency , meritocracy of ideas , focus on the public interest. The tools generated from open innovation are also, based on our experience, highly available, affordable, and interoperable.

Too often, participation is narrowly understood as a written response to a government proposal. Instead, focus should be on encouraging participation through useful work by developing tools on a collaborative basis from relevant stakeholders which involve elements ranging from collecting and verifying data, bench marking its implementation, and the monitoring of its execution. This kind of participation is not well accounted for under the current consultative processes, which understand formal participation only as a persuasive document. Fortunately, we are no longer confined to the strictures of simply faxing in (or even mailing in) comments; the Web has allowed broader and more vigorous participation.

There are some useful examples that the Action Plan could draw upon. “Apps” contests, like Apps for Democracy and Apps for America, have been used largely as a tool for improving or supplementing the services delivered by government. We believe that there is also an opportunity to engage the software development community as policy is being developed, through contests and other means, to ensure their effective administration and help prevent unintended consequences.

Such tools would also increase the type and nature of feedback an agency might receive. We can imagine agencies being more than a convening body for input on the immediate matter, but a collection point for related data sets and tools that could improve the quality of the conversation more generally.

The challenge, in our view, is the ‘next step’ in realizing the full potential of Web participation. Having benefited from the enormous potential of the Internet, using open source tools and open standards, there is a need to focus on tools and processes that assist agencies in assessing the data and making actionable responses. As a step toward this end, the National Action Plan should include a recognition of this core element and seek community input on the state of such tools (including business analytic tools), and how they can be reused and broadly populated.

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/NASA-launches-open-source-web-site-1404210.html
NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the US, has launched code.nasa.gov, a web site that will serve as the central source of information about the agency’s open source projects. The site, which is still in early alpha, is intended to help unify and expand NASA’s open source activities

Here’s a presentation that Openly Local‘s Chris Taggart gave during the 2011 Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw.

While it’s difficult to understand the full context, it appears Taggart is presenting a hypothetical scenario of what could happen to the open data movement if it doesn’t focus on key areas, such as forming a critical mass and getting Google to accommodate open data in its search results. Slides 27-33 offer ideas on how open data could be made more relevant and are worth reviewing.

One particular bullet point (“Build a business on open data. Really. Do it now!”) jumps out at me, because I hear this mantra over and over from people who aren’t practicing what they preach. My general comment is that there are vocal champions that advocate open data business models, but aren’t taking the entrepreneurial leap themselves.

My advice to them: Be the example.

(photo by duluoz cats)

This is old news, and I’ve been meaning to post sooner, but I absolutely love Memphis, so I can’t help myself.

Memphis announced it will develop its new website using the open source platform Drupal and OpenPublic. Mediacurrent, Linx Consulting and Phase2 Technology will collaborate on the project.

Open Knowledge Foundation co-founder Rufus Pollock discusses his ideas on scaling an open data ecosystem.

Excerpt:

In developing this open data ecosystem there are three key things are needed: material, tools and people. This is a key point: open information without tools and communities to utilise it is not enough, after all, openness isn’t an end itself – open material has no value if it isn’t used. We need therefore to have widely available the capabilities for utilising open material, for processing, analysing and sharing it, especially on a large scale. Relevant tools need to be freely and openly available and the related infrastructure — after all tools need somewhere to run, and data needs somewhere to be stored — should be capable of effective deployment by distributed communities.

Video:

The British government’s Cabinet Office has published an Open Source Procurement Toolkit as part of its ongoing information and communications strategy.

From the site:

The purpose of this toolkit is to ensure that there is a level playing field for open source and proprietary software and that some of the myths associated with open source are dispelled.

Links:

• All about Open Source v1 (pdf, 490kb)
• All about Open Source v1 0 (odf, 121kb)
• ICT Advice Note – Procurement of Open Source (pdf, 169kb)
• ICT Advice Note – Procurement of Open Source (odf, 37kb)
• Open Source Options v1.0 (pdf, 581kb)
• Open Source Options v1.0 (odf, 125kb)
• Total Cost of Ownership – things to consider v1.0 (pdf, 124kb)
• Total Cost of Ownership – things to consider v1.0 (odf, 198kb)
• PPN Open Source (pdf, 122kb)
• PPN Open Source (odf, 14kb)

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has a blog post on how cities are collaborating to better leverage data analytics and maximize taxpayer return on investment. The post cites examples from major American cities and how they’ve leveraged data, especially 311 logs, to realize efficiencies.

Excerpt:

Data-driven analytics is the systematic use of information to find patterns of interest. For cities, this means looking inwards at the detailed data that city agencies continually collect – citizen complaints, licenses and permits, transactions, violations – and identifying new areas of high risk and high cost.

Cities can then respond to these findings by prioritizing the high impact areas appropriately. In the past, individual agencies have been limited in their ability to conduct large-scale analytics by mandate, scope, and organizational structure. City agencies across the country, which each already have a prescribed list of duties they must fulfill to keep the city running smoothly, often do not share data with one another, nor are they equipped analyze it. In an era of shrinking budgets, however, many cities, including New York, have made new efforts to solve this problem by creating teams existing specifically for the purpose of data investigation that can cross agency boundaries, with promising results.

My recommendation to Bloomberg and other mayors would be to open the analytics to the public so that everyone has access and can contribute solutions. Perhaps a lesser concern, keeping this type of information private gives incumbents insider information when assessing what issues voters are most concerned about.

For those unfamiliar with the “Moneyball” premise and have’t read the book or seen the movie, here’s a two-minute overview:

Full post: Expanding the Use of Data Analytics in City Governments

Dilbert creator Scott Adams has a great editorial in The Wall Street Journal where he provides serious commentary on government and how civic-focused design would help modernize and better meet citizen expectations.

Quotables:

There’s a reason changing our system of government is slow going. I like to think of the government as a big, complicated machine. We citizens are the users. What we’ve always lacked is a well-designed user interface. That’s not a surprise when you consider the era in which our system was invented. Back then, the user interface for your mule involved a wooden club and language that would offend a pirate.

Perhaps what we need is a fourth branch of government, smallish and economical, operating independently, with a mission to build and maintain a friendly user interface for citizens to manage their government.

Imagine showing Jefferson the Internet. I think he’d immediately launch a start-up, design three apps and propose a new form of government that leverages social networks, all before lunch.

Full story: What If Government Were More Like an iPod?