We write a lot of code in the New York State Senate Office of the CIO. It’s all released under dual BSD and GPLv3 open-source license, and we post most of it here on GitHub. We fervently hope that our peers in government– whether in other legislative bodies, at other levels of government (e.g.: city, county, federal), or other branches of government (e.g.: NY State Agencies in the Executive Branch)– will find and make use of this code.
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However, most of the time for most of our applications to date, the promise of delivering more utility more efficiently by sharing the costs of developing and maintaining application code between peer public sector entities– better leveraging investments of precious tax dollars in public sector IT– is merely a good idea.
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I believe that citizens and governments alike would be well-served by an international non-profit entity (or perhaps a consortium of non-profit and for-profit entities committed to open-source?) charged with putting all these techniques together in a way that any public sector institution can easily contribute to and extract value from software development by their peers. Unlike some existing efforts, this organization would NOT be limited to moving the ball forward in a single thematic arena like “transparency” (e.g.: Sunlight Foundation) nor to a single geographic purview (e.g.: US Federal Government or New York State Government), nor focused within a specific government service sector (e.g.: Labor, Motor Vehicles, Tax), nor that is focused on a particular technology stack (e.g.: Drupal for Government).
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: gov20, Government 2.0, government20, opengov | 7 Comments »
