Results tagged “Open Source” from FastGov: Where Government is Going

In criss crossing the country talking with government technologists and business managers, I have been highlighting the experiment in co-creation of useful things by the District of Columbia.  You will remember earlier posts about the all-skate data mashup that was Apps for Democracy.  After 30 days of frenetic activity, the contest netted 47 new applications submitted by what might be best called "citizen developers," second cousins to citizen journalists (bloggers) who work in binary code rather than words.

These citizen developers are in growing demand. In fact, the federal government's launch of Data.gov this week came with a non-profit collaborative chaser.  Nisha Thompson, Organizer and Outreach Coordinator with the Sunlight Foundation, dropped me a note earlier today:

You have been blogging about Apps for Democracy so I wanted to let you
know about the Sunlight Foundation's new contest Apps for America: The
Data.gov Challenge.  As you might know Data.gov was launched today.  To
take advantage of the new information available in friendly formats we
wanted to challenge developers to make creative applications.  

You can see the contest information here:
http://sunlightlabs.com/contests/appsforamerica2/.

This is a wonderful, one-time opportunity to show the administration
the good that follows when they make information free. So we need to
seize it. And everyone's help in getting the word out is key.  At the
end of the day, the more great entries the Apps for America contest
receives, the more likely government is to release more data - and the
more data government releases the more transparent, accountable, and
efficient it can be.

As it happens, Apps for America has become a regular part of our conversations out on the road but had not made it to a blog entry yet -- at least until now.  The Data.gov challenge comes with over $20,000 in prize money -- it is what competition in the phrase friendly competition.  The coding commences immediately with the announcement of winners expected at the end of summer.

For its part, Apps for Democracy is back with what it is calling the Community Edition.  The sequel adds the dimension of community-based requirements definition -- that is, asking the people of DC what they would like -- during May, followed by a month of application development during June.  Not insignificantly, they have found another $35,000 in prize money.  There is even a code jam on June 6-7.  Details are available on its website.

The similarly named initiatives do a number of things that are important.  It is a real world test for the open source community and an opportunity for it to prove its worth in making government more transparent and the data it holds more useful.  It is also a test for governments to explore the possibility of engaging citizens where they naturally congregate -- on social networks and around the small glowing screens of their iPhones.

As the open government or transparency movement shifts from the historic focus on public records to data, these feed-driven apps begin to show us what can happen when public data are actually public.

The answer is in: what do you get from 260 data feeds and $20,000 in prize money?  The District of Columbia says you get 30 days of frenetic activity and 47 applications that mash up public data in ways that government itself may never had the time, inclination and impulse to develop themselves.  Such are the results of an aptly named competition, Apps for Democracy, which all but wrapped up round one today.

The winners range from the useful to the quirky and all point to the potential of democratizing data.  They all put the individual at the center of the transaction, which may be progress enough in rethinking the relationship between citizens and their government.

Here is a briefly annotated tour of the top two tiers of award winners:

Gold (Independent)

iLive.at - Doing errands in DC will never be the same.

Gold (Agency)

DC Historic Tours -- A walking tour planner, powered by a Google Maps-Flikr-Wikipedia mashup, minimizes steps and maximizes experience

Silver (Independent)

Park It DC -- fighting the constant circling, the unnecessary meter plugging and even expensive tickets that come with finding a parking spot in DC.

Where's My Money? DC -- The buck stops at a Facebook Forum on public expenditures, procurement and accountability.

DC Crime Finder -- Ripped from the databases, not the headlines -- a customizable look at crime in the neighborhood.

Silver (Agency)

Stumble Safely -- Making the streets of DC safe for pub crawls.

PointAbout Alerts -- an iPhone app makes crime reports, building permits and other civic  data location-aware in that you see the stuff that is closest to you first

We the People Wiki -- An editable Vox populi for our Web 2.0 times, embedding the voice (or keystrokes) of the people through an editable, peer-led community reference website based on Washington, D.C. public data.

The full list of winners is available at the Apps for Democracy Medal Winner page, which comes complete with the opportunity to vote on the People's Choice award -- and the polls for which remain open until Friday, November 14 at 7PM EST.

The medal winners and the honorable mentions (which are all other entrants for their willingness to innovate, compete and collaborate) are all open source and all are offered to others for refinement and reuse.  Perhaps more importantly, they keep hope alive for redeeming the reputation of a discredited phrase, your tax dollars at work.

"I wouldn't say that it is Microsoft making its peace with the open source community," said my friend Stuart McKee, national technology officer of state and local government at Microsoft, "but it is a microcosm of an awakening and maturing on all sides."

We were talking about Open eGov, the open source content management software developed by Newport News, Va., and subsequently merged with PloneGov, a repository of sharable software, with the participation of 55 other government organizations around the world.

"I agree with Stuart. It is a sign of maturity in the software market," said Andy Stein, IT director of Newport News and champion of the Open eGov collaboration. "It is the responsible thing to do."

Stein takes seriously his responsibility to expand capacity, share broadly and advocate for what he calls "fair and equitable cost sharing." That is all consistent with the tenets of the open source movement, but none of it is inconsistent with close ties -- organizationally and architecturally -- with commercial software providers. In fact, Stein said the next big project for Open eGov is to integrate the platform with Microsoft technologies, such as SharePoint and Active Directory. "Andy is astute on sharing and leveraging platforms that people want in creative ways," McKee said, noting that almost half of the 130,000 open source projects at SourceForge.net are built on Microsoft's platform.

The intersection of Microsoft, open source and public-sector IT hasn't always been this civil. Remember the high-stakes, career-defining dispute between Microsoft and Massachusetts just a few short years ago? It's too easy to attribute the changes to a shift from a set of quasi-ideological drivers in the open source movement (Massachusetts) to more pragmatic concerns (Newport News).

The blurring of the lines between commercial and open source software has accelerated in the interim. Consider that respected industry watcher Mark Anderson of the Strategic News Service said that at a post-Bill Gates Microsoft, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie is charged with finding the company's role in cloud computing -- where shrink-wrap is no longer king. Consider too that Microsoft now has an open source strategist and he is reportedly proposing a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack that can be used independently or as a platform for other components, but runs on Windows.

Stein said Open eGov is moving toward a WAMP stack too, but the collaboration needs Microsoft's help to make the integration work through access to SharePoint and other application programming interfaces -- the same stuff the average Microsoft business partner or independent software vendor relies on.

While he is waiting, Stein said Newport News has begun hosting Open eGov as a service for Franklin County, Va., at $260 per month. Simultaneously the collaboration has extended its membership to Waynesboro and Staunton, Va., and started merger talks with Plone-using Albuquerque, N.M. That leaves him with precious little time to bask in the reflected glory of the J. Robert Havlick Award for Innovation in Local Government, which Newport News picked up from the Alliance for Innovation in spring 2008.

Note: This post originated as a column in the October 2008 print issue of Government Technology/ Public CIO under the headline, Blurring the Lines. Its publication coincided with the GOSCON conference in Portland.

PORTLAND -- Aneesh Chopra, Vivek Kundra, Andy Stein and me. One of those people doesn't really belong at a national open source conference. But the good people at GOSCON did not know that when they invited me. I am making the Tuesday morning keynote (available as a PDF here --
10-08YouGov2GOSCONHandout.pdf ).

I really like the title -- YouGov2: WHy MTV isn't, why radio is a Pandora's box and why government service delivery will never be the same -- and I hope the people in the room like it. 

Their comments -- and yours -- are always welcome.