I was thrilled because I believe the Civic Commons Marketplace will ultimately save US taxpayers billions of dollars in government IT spending, while accelerating the propagation of technology-driven civic innovation in the bargain.  I’ve believed this for a while.   Thus, it’s a debate worth having; the Marketplace deserves attention, and critique.

In order to realize its potential, from my perspective as a recovering government CIO, I believe that the Civic Commons Marketplace must give equal billing to all software used in government, regardless of the software license associated with it; here’s why:

1. As a government IT buyer, I want to know what software my peers are using, and how it’s going.  Before the Civic Commons Marketplace came along, if I was to be an “innovative” CIO pushing the envelope, I would to go to conferences, trade shows, magazines, and myriad blogs and vendor marketing websites, and ping my socioprofessional network of people-smarter-than-I-am for information on who was using what software, who was developing what apps, and how it was going.  Then, I would narrow in on a few candidate software solutions and would call references provided to me by the vendors in question; if I remained dissatisfied with the options available to me externally, and had available skills and bandwidth amongst my staff (the exception rather than the rule) I might initiate my own new internal development project to build my own solution.  This evaluation process required a massive investment of time, felt haphazard, and didn’t net out any knowledge that would make this same process easier for my peers when they encountered the same software need in the future.  And I was an “innovative” CIO…  Most government tech buyers simply either purchase products off of government purchasing schedules, which are inherently biased against new and open-source solutions because of the cost and complexity of getting your software or services listed on them, or take what vendors with the largest marketing (and lobbying) budgets are pitching them.  They do so because it’s easier, and it’s lower risk.  ”No one gets fired for buying IBM,” is an old enterprise IT adage, and in government today that applies to Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Accenture, and <insert defense contractor of choice> et al. as well.  All this may sound like ammunition for the argument that Civic Commons needs to shine a light on GeoServer and omit all reference to arcGIS in order to level the playing field, but that misses the point.  Rather, as a government IT buyer, especially if I’m not a C-level appointee with a mandate for change, if I am to seriously consider a newer or more open software solution on the merits, I need a credible not-owned-by-a-vendor-or-industry-trade-association one-stop shop to find out what is being used where by my peers, and how it’s going– a place where I can make apples to apples comparisons of proprietary and open solutions.  That would help level the playing field for open-source software procurement in government.  The Civic Commons Marketplace, while still in beta, is well on its way to becoming that one-stop-shop.  When it gets there, it can save us billions.  If, on the other hand, the Civic Commons Marketplace became a segregated open-source-solutions-only knowledgebase, it would lose credibility with government IT buyers such as myself in my past life, and, I believe, less open-source software would be adopted in government.
2. As my friend Chief Innovation Officer of the State of Maryland Bryan Sivak is fond of saying amongst the Civic Commons digerati, sometimes proprietary solutions are the right solution for government; open-source is not a panacea in and of itself, though I firmly believe that it has structural advantages that will typically outcompete its proprietary alternatives over time, most of the time.  In the case of some software verticals, open-source solutions are not mature enough or well-enough supported to be the right choice for some government buyers. that’s ok.  I want those government buyers in that circumstance to make the right choice for their specific circumstance. This is further complicated by the advent of cloud-hosted solutions, in which the efficiency of purchasing a turnkey hosted service, coupled with corollary issues of portability of data between software applications, can often render the software license question moot, or at least less decisive.  The Civic Commons Marketplace can and should help  that government buyer to select proprietary software in that circumstance.  The problem comes in– and this happens all too often– when a government buyer has insufficient incentive to take appropriate risks, and when there is a lack of parity in terms of the data available to evaluate the relative risks and benefits of a proprietary software solution versus an open-source alternative.   In that circumstance, which was quite ubiquitous prior to the launch of the Civic Commons Marketplace, proprietary solutions will win and be selected most of the time. The advent of a neutral information commons, with information about proprietary and open-source solutions that enabled apples-to-apples comparisons, changes that dynamic.  It will, I believe, will result in open solutions being selected (and developed) far more often in government.

So, I believe that the Civic Commons Marketplace in its current form, open to listings of all software regardless of license, is highly necessary and valuable.   That said, there are at least three more nuanced concerns that I believe are valid, and that should in fact be on the roadmap for the Marketplace to address in the months ahead:

1.  Regarding the concern that a listing in the Marketplace is a tacit endorsement by the Civic Commons organization, I do believe that explicit clarification to the contrary on the website is warranted.  The Marketplace doesn’t play favorites any more than Crunchbase or Yelp.  It’s a wiki, folks.  This is critical because Civic Commons has limited staff and budget, and because their staff, while highly knowledgable about public sector open solutions, would never be able to author nor exert authoritative editorial control over all civic software function verticals.   Still, early revs of the Marketplace included a nuanced ratings functionality.   It may help to add that back in.
2. Regarding Gunnar Hellekson‘s perspective that a comprehensive catalog of all government IT deployments may not be as useful as a more focused catalog of solutions, I believe that such a focused catalog will be most valuable if it is culled from and built upon a foundation of a more comprehensive knowledgebase.  For example, a catalog of open-source Open311 compliant solutions would be valuable to me as a government buyer, but not as valuable as if that catalog were built from a knowledgebase that also allowed me to contrast these open solutions with New York City’s SiebelCRM-based 311 solution, Citivox‘s proprietary but open-standards-compliant SaaS solution, etc.   In other words, the Marketplace 1.0 is intended to be a platform– a mashable knowledgebase upon which a variety of derivative products, such as this notional “focused solutions catalog of open-source government customer service solutions” can readily be built, either as a future rev of the Marketplace itself, or as a separate offering built using its young but increasingly robust API.
3. Gunnar also pointed out to me that ‘entries free of context, like cost and use-case, serve only to promote a product, and don’t help in decision-making.’  I agree with this critique as well, but again, believe that the Marketplace 1.0 is a necessary foundation upon which this metadata can readily be layered over time.  If the Marketplace 1.0 had instead focused on a narrower catalog with more comprehensive metadata and user stories, its impact might be greater in the immediate-term, but I believe would ultimately be more limited.  What if wikipedia had been written as an encyclopedia of only those subject areas where its founders found traditional encyclopedias lacking?  Again, let’s add these important new requirements as feature requests for Marketplace 2.0– the project ticket tracker is public and open to all.

Full disclosure: I’m on the Board of the parent organization of OpenGeo, have great friends who work at ESRI, and my company helped to build the initial beta version of the Civic Commons Marketplace.

New York State Senate “Open Senate” Initiative

Open Senate is an online “Gov 2.0″ program intended to make the Senate one of the most transparent, efficient, and participatory legislative bodies in the nation. Open Senate is comprised of multiple sub-projects led by the Office of the Chief Information Officer in the New York State Senate, ranging from migrating to cost effective, open-source software solutions, to developing and sharing original web services providing access to government transparency data, to promoting the use of social networks and online citizen engagement. Participatory websites were developed for all 62 Senators and more than 40 Senate Committees, and integrated with social networking tools; data portals for publishing and receiving public comment on all administrative and legislative data were deployed; use of open-source software, open data standards, and cloud-based-hosting services minimized the cost of these innovations. Open Senate won Best of New York “Visionary” and “Project Excellence” awards in 2010 from the Center for Technology in Government.  Key elements of Open Senate include:

NYSenate.gov – NYSenate.gov serves both as an accessible repository of all legislative and institutional administrative data, and well as a leading “Gov 2.0″ portal comprised of websites for all 62 Senators and more than 40 Senate Committees that support citizens in interacting directly with their elected officials and the legislative process.

Open Administrative Data – Prior to 2009, most legislative and administrative data either needed to be FOIL’d or had not been available at all. Examples include live and archived video of committee meetings and public hearings, payroll and expenditure reports in spreadsheet format, committee votes, and floor votes.

Open Legislation – “OpenLeg” is a website and an Application Programming Interface (API) that makes legislative data available to the public in a way that it can easily be searched, commented upon, and shared socially with others. Some of this legislative information, such as Committee Votes, was not available anywhere online (not even on the Assembly website or in the paid version of the Legislative Bill Drafting Commission’s Legislative Research Service) until its publication on the Open Leg website, pursuant to new Senate Rules passed in July of 2009. All data is available in industry standard open formats as “feeds,” and the publicly accessible API allows the data to be integrated directly into web applications by third-parties. The data that is available on the OpenLegislation website is also leveraged for internal software applications. CIO-STS is currently working to leverage that information in internal legislative applications to help both central staff and member offices.

Mobile — NYSenate Mobile, comprised of custom applications developed specifically for iPhones, iPads, and Android phones, as well as a full Senate website optimized for any mobile web browser, is the first mobile application in the nation developed by a legislative body. These apps pull together information from across the Senate – all 62 Senator offices, all 32 Legislative Committees allowing citizens, staff, and journalists to search for bill information, contact Senators, review event calendars, read Senator’s blogs, watch archived video of Senate Session, Committee Meetings and Public Hearings, and even submit Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests. Those with devices that have built in GPS can even use the application to identify the Senator that represents the region that the user is currently in while running the look up.

Open Source — NYSenate.gov and Open Legislation exclusively use open-source software, so the Senate does not owe any license fees for their maintenance; furthermore, all software code for the projects is published online and freely available under open-source BSD and GPLv3 licenses for re-use by peers in government and any other third-party, thus increasing the anticipated ROI of our investment in these projects.

Open Standards & APIs — All data and other content used in NYSenate.gov and Open Legislation is also published as data feeds in open standards formats such as XML, CSV, and JSON, and there is also a freely available Application Programming Interface (API). This empowers third-parties to do much of our work for us, developing applications that provide access to Senate data in a variety of value-added forms such as interactive voice response (IVR) telephony, at no additional cost to the taxpayer, thus again increasing the anticipated ROI of our investment in these projects.

Open Content — NYSenate.gov has also garnered national attention for its progressive content licensing policies, as the first State website that has copyrighted its content under a “Creative Commons” license, which affirms the public right to freely reuse content under the stipulation that it not be used for political fundraising purposes.

Background

In May 2009, the Office of the CIO of the New York State Senate (created for the first time in February 2009), unveiled “Open Senate”: an online “Gov 2.0″ program intended to make the Senate one of the most transparent, efficient, and participatory legislative bodies in the nation. Participatory websites were developed for all 62 Senators and more than 40 Senate Committees, and integrated with social networking tools; data portals for publishing and receiving public comment on all administrative and legislative data were deployed; use of open- source software, open data standards, and cloud-based-hosting services minimized the cost of these innovations.

At www.nysenate.gov/open, the Senate now provides the public with easy to use search interfaces to find out information on nearly all activities and reports of the Senate. This includes legislation, calendars, committee agendas, voting records, and even payroll and expenditure reports.

Our “Open Legislation” web interface makes simple intuitive keyword searching of legislative information available to the public, and solicits public comment on all bills. In addition to the web interface, all data is available in industry standard open formats as “feeds,” complete with a publicly accessible Application Programming Interface (API) that allows the data to be integrated directly into web applications by third-parties.

The Senate has also committed to making digital video of Senate legislative events available to the public. Live and archived video of legislative proceedings including legislative session, committee meetings, and public hearings are all made available on NYSenate.gov. Archived video is also available directly from 3rd party sites such as the official NYSenate YouTube channel, and on Blip.tv.

In addition to making video and data available, the Senate has also gone to great lengths to ensure that the information is easily shared with others. Examples of approaches that facilitate sharing and reuse include “permalink” URL’s for bills, embeddable videos, and the integration of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking platforms into NYSenate.gov. A majority of NYS Senators now actively use these social networking platforms in conjunction with NYSenate.gov, at no marginal cost to the Senate, to interact with their constituents.

In order to maximize public benefit and reuse, the content on NYSenate.gov is licensed under a Creative Commons copyright – the first legislative body in the United States to do so. The Senate also adopted a dual FreeBSD and GPLv3 open-source software license for all programming code written by the Senate, implemented public source code repository on GitHub, and published an API (Application Programming Interface) through which third-party programmers, including other government entities, can leverage Senate data for their own unique online applications, thus maximizing the return on the investment of effort and tax dollars that has been made.

Significance

“Open Senate” is without precedent among State Legislatures, but has been developed in concert with Open Government mandates issued by the White House beginning in January 2009 with a memo regarding the Freedom of Information Act, and continuing with the issuance of the Open Government Directive in December 2009. Open Senate was also developed in response to a unique status quo in New York State:

The New York State Senate, under one-Party rule for 44 years until 2009, was long regarded as one of the most opaque, dysfunctional and even corrupt legislative bodies in the country. Prior to the launch of NYSenate.gov in May 2009, the Senate website, at http://senate.state.ny.us, was a proprietary system that did not adopt modern web standards, technologies, or licenses.

It presented a fractured experience, as the home page was on a different platform than Senator websites, and offered little in the way of web 2.0 interactive functionality.  Additionally, members of the Senate Majority were provided with more functionality than Minority members. Finally, it contained no information about when and where public events were to be held, let alone transcripts of proceedings, or administrative data about Senate spending. Concerned constituents had to purchase a $2500 data subscription annually to see how their legislators had voted on bills.

Today, barely 18 months after a change in Senate leadership, the creation of the Office of the CIO, and the launch of the Open Senate Initiative, New Yorkers with a computer or mobile phone arguably have more comprehensive access to legislative, administrative, and official legislative event information, and have more ways to communicate interactively with their elected legislators, than constituents in any other State.

O’Reilly Media’s new book, “Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice,” features Open Senate, and describes this stark contrast as follows:

“With the 2008 election of a new Democratic majority, the New York Democratic Senators made a commitment to transparency and modernization… The Senate’s quick shift toward transparency, information modernization, and open information policies have radically improved the information publication within the state, catapulting them from a 1970s framework to a full-fledged modern legislative body… The New York State Senate, in less than a year, with legislative leadership and a fresh technology team, overcame what I would call the most complicated, tension-filled, overly politicized legislative environment and anachronistic technology I’ve ever seen. They are quickly progressing toward more transparency, access, and modernization. Now, the New York State Assembly—and other legislatures—have an example to follow.”

Public Benefit

Citizens have responded to the Senate’s efforts; more than 1.6 million unique visitors have used NYSenate.gov since its launch in May of 2009. More than 220,000 people have watched live streaming video on NYSenate.gov, and over 600,000 have viewed archived Senate videos on YouTube. More than 10,000 Senate archived videos have been shared, rated, or commented on. “Crowdsourcing” initiatives on NYSenate.gov have elicited nearly 7,000 “votes” on legislative ideas, and more than 1,000 comments on specific pieces of legislation. We continue to update constituent engagement statistics weekly on the online NYSenate Open Data portal.

Local media and non-profit interest groups have benefitted as well; a recent collaboration between NYPIRG and the Albany Times-Union newspaper leveraged the programmatic accessibility of data through Open Legislation to analyze Senate Session transcripts, yielding a brand new data set, which the Times-Union then published, ranking Senators by the number of words that they have spoken in debate on the Senate Floor. This sort of analysis is facilitated by the open, standards-compliant manner in which Open Legislation is designed and its data presented.

One of the Senate’s most notable online events occurred when a Marriage Equality bill came to the floor in December 2009. As many as 15,000 concurrent viewers watched the proceedings live online from around the world and discussed the floor debate virtually in an online chat as the debate unfolded. Video uploaded to YouTube was disseminated far and wide, further amplifying the debate, and yielding a massive spike in online visibility of some Senators. For example, one Senator’s five minute speech during the debate was viewed more than 300,000 times on YouTube in the two weeks following the debate.

Our Open Senate program has been nationally recognized by peers inside and outside of government:

“The Open Legislation site changes the relationship citizens have with their government and demonstrates the New York State Senate’s commitment to a transparent and accessible government,” said Dave McClure, the U.S. General Services Administration’s Associate Administrator of the Office of Citizen Services and Communications. “Now, more than ever before, state and local governments, the federal government, and other nations can use this innovative technology to reach out and engage more citizens in the legislative process.”

A recent report by the Federal Trade Commission making recommendations regarding the publishing of government data online in order to support a reinvention of the Journalism industry, cites Open Senate as a model of fiscal responsibility: “…once a government entity has created an appropriate web platform and relevant information is in an appropriate digital format, government-related content can be posted on official web pages for a relatively low cost. The New York State Senate provides one relevant example.”

Our staff have been invited to keynote conferences alongside the directors of WhiteHouse.gov (which adopted the same open-source “Drupal” software that NYSenate.gov uses several months after the launch of NYSenate.gov), and have delivered seminars to Federal web managers about how to implement new Open Government policies online. We frequently field inquiries from our peers in other States about the policies and software that enabled us to accomplish this work in such a short timeframe at such low cost.

Execution of this “worst-to-first” project, leveraging Government 2.0 tools and techniques to open up a legislature, did not break the bank. Use of open-source software as well as free or low-cost web-based services for streaming video (e.g.: YouTube and Livestream) and for website hosting (on Amazon’s “EC2″ cloud computing service) minimized the costs of its development and maintenance. In its first year, NYSenate.gov and Open Legislation cost $122,000 in initial 3rd party software consulting costs (for customization of open-source Drupal software), and $25,000 in hosting, domain registration, analytics, and video streaming costs. As the software is open-source and now fully maintained by in-house staff, the Senate anticipates little if any outside development costs in the coming years. There has been one full time web developer, one part time developer, and one product manager that devoted to maintenance of the site.

We have used our Open Government project mandate as a forcing factor for internal enterprise IT modernization (e.g.: using the open-source platform Drupal as well as leveraging Cloud- computing for software development and hosting instead of an expensive Mainframe). In fact, corollary IT modernization executed by the same team in the Senate enabled a *reduction* of nearly $1 million in the total IT budget of the Senate for 2009, including salaries and direct costs, relative to 2008, and a reduction of more than $500,000 relative to the average annual Senate IT budget for the ten years prior to 2009.

By developing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and adhering to open standards for our software and data publishing, we have empowered third-parties to do much of our work for us, developing applications that provide access to Senate data in a variety of value-added forms such as interactive voice response (IVR) telephony, at no additional cost to the taxpayer.

Notable Quotes About Open Senate

“The New York Senate is taking a critically important step to help restore trust in government. By enabling citizens to see and understand the process better, the senate enables democracy to function better. At a time when confidence in government in general has hit bottom, this is an extraordinarily valuable step forward,” said Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law School and founder of Change-Congress.org

“The NY State Senate’s significant expansion of the Open Legislation Web site to include attendance, transcripts and votes is path breaking. They are clearly setting the place that all other legislative bodies will have to follow. The U.S. Congress ought to be taking some clue from them,” said Ellen Miller, co-founder and Executive Director, The Sunlight Foundation.

“The NY Senate is making enormous strides in improving government transparency through their Open Legislation Website. The immediate benefits of these are increased government accountability and accessibility, and it’s heartening to see the senate team has been asked to offer guidance to the federal government at the Federal USA.gov Web Manager University seminar. The senate team remains leaders in the open-government movement including President Obama’s recent directive,” said Dawn Barber, co-founder, NY Tech Meetup.

“Governments are using Internet technology to show the public how law is made and how legislatures really work,” added Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.org and The Craigslist Foundation. “With this new system, New York State takes a leadership role in accountability and transparency.”

“I look forward to being able to engage with a government as opaque as the NY State Legislature with a tool as promisingly transparent as Open Legislation,” said Douglas Rushkoff, professor of Media Studies at the New School in Manhattan. “It’s not that the data wasn’t available before – it just wasn’t accessible. This site may just help us see what’s going on in a way that allows us to do something about it.”

“NY’s Open Legislation doesn’t just put legislative information out into the public, but makes it a part of the living Web — easy to find, reuse, and talk about,” said David Weinberger, Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “Best of all, it feels like the Web!”

“This open legislation site changes the relationship citizens have with their government and demonstrates the New York State Senate’s commitment to a transparent and accessible government,” said Dave McClure, the U.S. General Services Administration’s Associate Administrator of the Office of Citizen Services and Communications. “Now, more than ever before, state and local governments, the federal government, and other nations can use this innovative technology to reach out and engage more citizens in the legislative process.”

“Citizens Union applauds the expansion of the State Senate’s ‘Open Legislation’ web tool to contain committee votes, transcripts, agendas and other important materials that will give the public greater insight into the legislative process,” Dick Dadey, Executive Director of Citizens Union, said. “We support the fulfillment of the Senate rules promise for greater transparency through the Senate website, and believe it is an invaluable tool for the public in holding our elected officials accountable.”

“The League of Women Voters applauds Senator Valesky and the State Senate for its efforts to further open the legislative process. For those not-for-profits who cannot afford the expense of LRS, this is a huge benefit enabling them to impact state government in a timely manner. Importantly, it will also better allow the average citizen the ability to keep their legislators accountable,” said Barbara Bartoletti, Legislative Director for the League of Women Voters.

“NYPIRG commends the senate for its continuing efforts to use technology to bring government closer to the people,” said Blair Horner, NYPIRG Legislative Director.

March 4th: Presentation to Senator Liz Krueger‘s High School Civics Class at the Julia Richman Education Complex

March 10th: PACE University Political Science lecture

March 19th: Panelist for “Meaning of Open Government in the Digital Age” at the Open Government In the Digital Age Summit (organized by the New York State Office of the Chief Information Officer / Office For Technology)

March 24th: Presentation at Web 2.o For Government (organized by The New York Forum Emerging Technologies Working Group)

March 26th: Keynote Address at Open Gov West (organized by Knowledge As Power); archived video here

April 5th: Lecture at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government

April 9th: Presentation at PSFK New York

April 21st: Keynote Panel at Drupalcon San Francisco

Aprul 22nd: Government CRM talk at Civicon

April 28th: Government Transparency talk in the Capitol to staff of the Armenian Legislature (US State Dept International Visitor Leadership Program and International Center of the Capital Region)

April 29th: “Open Government” Panel at the 2010 CIO Academy (Organizing and Moderating)

May 4th: NYS Forum Government Cloud Computing Presentation

May 25th: Presentation at Gov 2.0 Expo; preview video here

June 10th: Presentation of Open Legislation at the Personal Democracy Forum

July 23rd: Organizing “Getting to We.gov” panel at Netroots Nation

August 20th: Presentation at the second annual CapitolCamp in Albany

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 (and some on Drupal.org).  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.

For example, our NYSenate.gov website, into which 1000s of hours of developer work have been invested to customize the Drupal CMS platform for our legislative body, should ideally be able to meet the quite analogous website needs of the ~98 other State-level legislative bodies in the USA, not to mention the 1000s of City Councils in the USA.  I’d like it to be easy for an IT Director for any legislative body in the US to quickly and easily get capabilities analogous to NYSenate.gov without needing to reinvent our wheel.

But It’s Hard…

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.

We try to go the extra mile to document our code well, posting it on GitHub, making our peers aware of it through speaking engagements, participation in unconferences, and use of the social Internets, and by liberating the data at least through our extensive support for open data standards and APIs.  We field calls about approach and policy and precedent frequently from our peers.  However, there is no question that it remains a heavy lift for a peer institution to actually take our application code and efficiently drop it into their own use case, because our code is necessarily customized to our specific nuanced needs in the Senate.  Like most government entities these days, we’re understaffed relative to the workload we have.  We don’t have the resources to easily contribute the custom Drupal modules we’ve written to Drupal.org and commit to becoming the maintainers of these modules.  Nor do we have time to refactor our code into a more generic “Legislative CMS product” for our peers to more easily find and make use of.

Another example– this time one in which another government entity could help us here at the NY Senate: friends of mine at NASA recently built an online application (in their own free time) that leverages NASA’s publicly accessible LDAP server data (which is a subset of the internally accessible data from the same LDAP server), and then allow NASA employees to “claim” their profile on this public website, and add additional metadata like your Gravatar, your skills and interests, etc.  Here in the NY Senate we’ve been researching enterprise social networking & collaboration applications that could help our internal staff to discover and leverage specific interests and skills of their colleagues.   The application written for NASA, which is open-source and posted on GitHub, could help meet this need for us, but at the moment we’d have to rip out and replace code in order for us to be able to use it; it would take the NASA crew some significant additional work to refactor the code to turn it into more of a product in which we could merely edit a config file to deploy it for NY Senate…

In both our NY Senate example and the NASA example, if the refactoring work on code were done, and some level of ongoing maintenance and support of the code were available, more value would have been returned from tax dollars invested in our respective work, and we would also in turn be able to leverage off of the additional refinement of our code done by our peers in government to further benefit our institution.  In other words, we could share the workload of software development and maintenance with our peers in government.

In the case of some business applications, vendors do offer productized SaaS solutions that meet the needs of a customer vertical like “legislative body.”  But these solutions are rarely open-source, and are often either prohibitively expensive, or are not really built to suit the nuanced needs of a niche customer group, because such a niche may not be a large enough potential business market to warrant development of a highly nuanced product.  Therefore, I think that the public sector needs to innovate in terms of self-support of technical collaboration.

I can envision a thematically-focused technically competent organization like the Sunlight Foundation doing the heavy lifting on a specific application that might be of specific interest to them, like our Open Legislation application.   Others of our peers, like the NYS Department of Labor, have taken explicit steps to increase technical collaboration with other Labor organizations in the public sector by creating online hubs like LaborForge.  Forge.mil sets a strong precedent at the Federal level, and I’ve heard rumors of a Forge.gov to be launched in the future.

Open standards help.  Unconferences and virtual peer communities of practice help.  Open APIs help.  Open software licenses help.  Code repositories help.  Cloud computing infrastructure in which a machine image can be cloned with a few clicks helps.  Developing applications within a service-oriented architecture (SOA) helps. The promise of online government app stores and feature servers help.

However, all of these approaches today are being implemented piecemeal if at all, and, when they are, often within a narrow niche where a motivated group of peers seeks help in solving a single problem they’re focused on at a single time.

A Solution?…

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 be 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).  Rather, such a non-profit technology organization or consortium would:

1. Map the the virtual space of government IT applications (ranging from procurement and contract management, to payroll and other business applications, to citizen identity management, to CMS to CRM to more niche applications like news clippings services and legislative research tools);
2. Find open-source licensed code that is being developed within the public sector to address these application needs and that could deliver value for a wide range of public sector entities;
3. Do the hands-on work to generalize the code so that it is broadly useful and productized as much as practical;
4. Publicize the availability of the new open-source products within the government (as customer) and public sector IT consulting services communities;
5. Provide support and maintenance of the code for its public sector consumers and contributors;
6. Maintain roadmaps for, and convene multi-institution developer communities around, specific major areas of opportunity for ongoing collaborative software innovation.
7. Play a role in the planning and build-out of government clouds, app stores, and feature servers.

Such an entity, once fully realized and effective over a period of years, I believe could yield hundreds of millions of dollars of tax dollar savings worldwide on public sector software development and licensing annually.  It could also significantly expand the size of the public sector market addressable by small and medium-sized IT consulting firms by moving dollars spent from software licensing to customization and support, and by allowing small engineering teams from separate companies and institutions to more easily collaborate to achieve large scale engineering capacity when required.

In other words, such an effort might well  reduce government IT costs, increase the capacity for government entities to collaborate with one another through technology, increase competition in the private sector for government IT contracts, and increase the likelihood that smaller businesses can provide services higher in the food chain of government IT contracts.

Organizations that I hope will look at taking on part or all of this opportunity include Code for America, the Open Planning Project, the World Bank, ExpertLabs, and perhaps the Ford Foundation’s Effective Government Program.

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Dear Mei,

Yes it’s pretty scary to me that McCain-Palin can be polling equal to or ahead of Obama. Obama isn’t doing a perfect job on the campaign trail, but I say “so what”…. This election is NOT about Obama. He has some of the smartest most principled Americans I’ve ever met surrounding him, and I believe he’d be an outstanding President. So would Biden.

But the bigger issue, to me, is how horrendous the alternative would be.

McCain is even older than Ronald Reagan was in his 2nd term as President, and we now know as a historical fact that Reagan was senile by the time he left office. Members of my family the same age as McCain cite this fact as one of their primary reasons for being so worried about the prospect of electing him.  McCain admits that he knows little about economic policy, at a time of severe economic pain here in the US. And McCain is in many ways to the RIGHT of George Bush on foreign policy. He was bound and determined to go into Iraq three days after 9/11, the facts about who attacked us be damned. Iran is next, if he becomes President.

And I find the prospect of Palin as President, should anything happen to McCain, absolutely terrifying– someone who had never had a passport or traveled outside of North America in her life until last year, leading the world’s most powerful nation for the next four years? She would not only be ignorant about the rest of the world, but apparently also about the rest of the USA– she and her husband supported a political party that advocated secession for Alaska from the USA! And on domestic policy, she lies unapologetically about her public service record (regarding seeking “earmark” money from the Federal government from Alaska), and she would like to make it illegal for a raped woman have an abortion, even if her life is in danger.

If they’re elected, I think the US will continue to be perceived as belligerent around the world, will continue to spend far more than we can afford further destabilizing the world’s largest economy, will have the most conservative Supreme Court in modern history for the next 30 years, and will take no serious action on climate change. The choice couldn’t be more clear.

I think it’s likely to come down to Ohio in the election once again, and the best way I know to impact that State’s election is through my friend Billy Wimsatt’s “get out the vote” initiative: http://www.votetodayohio.org . Send your American friends there and they’ll make a difference in this election– and/or get them to support it financially at http://www.actblue.com/entity/fundraisers/21134

Thanks for your concern and your support!

Andrew