OSCON 2009: Governments and open source

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It is hard to have an overriding "theme" at an event as large as O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON), but during the 2009 convention, one subject that came up again and again was increasing the number of connections between open source and government. There are three basic facets to the topic: adoption of open source products by government agencies, participation in open source project development by governments and their employees, and using open source to increase transparency and public access to governmental data and resources. Though much of the discussion (particularly in the latter category) sprang from the new Obama administration's interest in open data and government transparency, very few of the issues are US-centric: the big obstacles to government adoption of open source technology are the same around the world, from opaque procurement processes to fears about secrecy and security.

O'Reilly CEO Tim O'Reilly was the first to broach the subject, in his Wednesday morning keynote, and over the next three days, no fewer than three talks and three panel discussions dealt with government and open source interaction. The Open Source Initiative's (OSI) Danese Cooper led the "Open Source, Open Government" panel, which addressed all three dimensions of the issue turn by turn. Deborah Bryant of Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (OSL) led the panel discussion "Bureaucrats, Technocrats and Policy Cats: How the Government is turning to Open Source, and Why," which focused on adoption and transparency. Adina Levin of Socialtext led the "Hacking the Open Government" panel in a discussion centering on open data access.

Clay Johnson's "Apps for America" session dealt with open source adoption and open data, courtesy of Sunlight Labs' involvement in the US government's Data.gov service. Gunnar Hellekson of Red Hat emphasized government participation in his "Applying Open Source Principles to Federal Government" talk, and the "Computational Journalism" session by Nick Diakopoulos and Brad Stenger dealt with practical examples of turning open access government data into a usable form. Finally, Sunlight Labs led all-day hackathon sessions Wednesday through Friday, helping attendees build applications that use government data sources.

Government usage of open source

The open source community has two reasons to encourage increased usage of open source code by government agencies: because it believes in the inherent value of open source, and because using free software instead of proprietary software means less taxpayer money is spent on IT infrastructure. Several of the OSCON sessions addressed the barriers to entry faced by open source as a product. Some are well-known, such as long-time government contractors' larger presence in the bidding process and the lingering perception that open source code leaves no one to blame when problems arise.

Other issues, however, are less frequently raised but just as real. For example, several panelists at "Open Source, Open Government" agreed that some government entities put up fierce resistance to free software because they do not want to run afoul of ethics laws that prohibit them from accepting gifts — if free software has value, then government officials are not allowed to receive the code without paying for it. That objection elicited a small amount of laughter from the audience, but all on stage agreed that it is a genuine concern.

Solutions to these barriers to entry involve both new ideas and old-fashioned legwork. OSI's Michael Tiemann observed that government's distinctive buying habits permit open source some additional advantages over proprietary software, for those who are looking for them. He cited the example of product retirement: government agencies are often restricted in how and when they can dispose of old technology (for security and budgetary reasons). In contrast, open source products that are deemed failed experiments or simply no longer needed can be disposed of easily. Hellekson concurred, noting that the US Department of Defense has recently acknowledged that breaking projects into smaller, modular chunks is more successful than the traditional large contracts.

As O'Reilly pointed out in his keynote, though, getting open source products considered during the bidding process for most government contracts is primarily a challenge of persistence. There are many people with the skills to navigate the procurement processes, he said, but considering the specialization required, few are able or willing to make selling to a single customer (such as a national government) their entire career.

Government contributions to open source

Once a government agency has adopted an open source package for its own internal use, there is often another battle to get the agency to participate in the open source development model, sending patches or even bug reports back upstream. Digium's John Todd noted that, in his experience with the Asterisk project, public employees often are not permitted to contribute code to open source projects, or they find that there is no process in place to get approval to contribute.

Bryant responded to Todd's story by saying that OSL had some resources that could prove useful in talking to public employees. OSL also hosts the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON), which emphasizes participation in open source development.

Hellekson cited several examples of government agencies that are participating in open source development, notably NASA's CoLab, the Department of Energy, the US Navy, and the National Consortium for Offender Management Systems, a coalition of state correctional agencies.

Enhancing government with open source

Using open source software to improve government transparency and access was the most popular aspect of the government/open source connection — in large part encouraged by the recent appointment of two open source-friendly people to prominent technology positions in the US government: Aneesh Chopra for Federal Chief Technology Officer and Vivek Kundra for Federal Chief Information Officer.

"Open government" as a political principle is not specific to software, but many of the speakers and panelists at OSCON centered in on the areas where open source software could contribute to the broader goal: namely, making government-produced and government-collected data easier to access and mine, and building mash-ups and other applications on top of government sources that expose new information to the public.

Several of the speakers, including the Sunlight Foundation's Greg Elin, emphasized that the new US administration's present interest in open data is a valuable opportunity to showcase the useful public applications that open source software can produce — but that the window of opportunity will not remain open for long, thanks to re-election cycles and waning interest. By the end of 2009, said Johnson, if open source coders have not build demonstrable success stories on top of the government's open data, it will be harder to persuade Washington D.C. to open up additional data sets.

Sunlight Labs' focus is building applications that take advantage of Data.gov, a new initiative that makes raw data catalogs publicly available in machine- and human-readable form. The initial data sets released are collected from 18 agencies such as the US Geological Survey, Environmental Protection Agency, Patent and Trademark Office, and even the Department of Homeland Security. Sunlight is sponsoring a development contest that will award $25,000 in prizes to open source application developers that use Data.gov.

The various OSCON panels discussed what tools and infrastructure are needed to better take advantage of the data that governments do provide — including query pre-processors to enable better searching, document-to-data conversion utilities, reusable encapsulation APIs in popular languages like Python and Ruby, and good simulation and prediction models to analyze the data itself in more than a historical context.

Hellekson summarized what the open source community can do to better work with government agencies making their first forays into open source collaboration. His three points were to remember that "government agencies" are actually just people, to allow those people to make mistakes and learn from them, and to celebrate their successes.

Hobbyist, to enterprise, to government

From an open source developer's perspective, local, regional, and national governments represent potential users, customers ... and developers. Much of the OSCON discussion about open source and government moved beyond such practical technical considerations to touch on philosophy, too — open content from governments should lead to more transparent processes, greater accountability, and better democracy, so the argument goes.

However one feels about that question, though, working more closely with government agencies can be a huge win for open source projects and communities. Excitement over the possibilities was on display at OSCON; with luck the increased engagement with the public sector will be just as fruitful as it has been with the enterprise sector over the past few years.