5pm Session
· Openthegovernment.org promoting policy changes. Others working on citizen participation and notions of Personal democracy.
Federal web managers association
Geocommons mapmaking to help in cases of disaster - street maps
“Solutions looking for problems”
· OSU has open source lab
Too often people try to advocate for complex processes to people who only care about outputs. Open source digital voting initiative. Building application with election officials to set standards 20 states signed on right. Design congress to derive requirements. Government projects need those strategies to get this done.
· Why not default to open source in government? Need for lobbying as proprietary advocates do. However, OS advocates often prefer not to take a legislated mandate approach because they want to compete in the marketplace.
· Are there open source options that do compete on the marketplace?
Planning and procurement process, licensing another 2-3 years. Hard for OS options to compete. More availability of those alternatives emerging though. Happens in government operations more that OS is used. Mostly under the radar. Right tool for right job, not religion or debate about proprietary.
DOD DHS GSA find open source to be more secure. State Dept. provides flexibility they need. Intelligence community. Intelipedia= best practice that is being models elsewhere.
Wordpress is what they use for blogs.
- Where is government putting out calls for development?
Not following contracts. “I wish for mashup” change that has to happen in procurement process. See the solution, write an rfp – much more difficult to describe what you need and put that in the RFP.
- How do people help the government?
Social civil technical activists in the business of providing data. Dev goes at different speed than government.
Advisory Committee Act restricts volunteer contributions. Rather than reform and revisit. Now looking at new policy.
- Government innovations lab suggested.
Each agency doing own thing, way to centralize? Reduce duplication.
Replicate it government wide.
Tech core.
- Transparency directive. 120 time frame 40 days into it. website to offer input. Government R&D lab – CTO could oversee it.
- October conference. Govloop. Need a Ted-like conference to showcase best practices of government agencies.
- Do something for government in a laboratory will be it be open? Available?
Small organizations cannot find fedbiz.ops. they will not find operations. Digitization projects that go to private companies could be work libraries would have done.
GSA schedule gives you a leg up. barrier to entry to working
New models needed for procurement.
- Open source voting model.
National specification for certifying against standard. Bring more people into government who value open flow of information.
- Street happens citizens feel, “I have influence because I’m in conversation. Because I feed valuable information to people. I engage them”
