Open Source Software to Support EPA’s National Environmental Information Exchange Network

I’m not a fan of simply passing along a press release, but I found this one to exemplifiy the growing trend I see in open source software in government;

• OSS adoption and use is moving beyond tools and infrastructure and up the stack
• More vendors are becoming involved in providing services and support, key to successful government IT strategies (proprietary or open source)
• And something I’ve been saying for four years; the greatest value to governments lies in the model itself, creating collaborative communities with common program missions and business requirements.

"CGI Announces Open Source Software to Support EPA’s National Environmental Information Exchange Network

FAIRFAX, VA, June 3 — CGI Federal, Inc., a wholly-owned U.S. operating subsidiary of CGI Group Inc. (NYSE: GIB; TSX: GIB.A), today announced the release of the first Open Source Node 2.0 software product to be available to EPA data exchange partners on the National Environmental Information Exchange Network (Exchange Network). The CGI Node 2.0 software is offered to Exchange Network partners and other interested members of the environmental community to give them capabilities to publish, share, and gain access to environmental data for improved decision making.

The National Environmental Information Exchange Network includes EPA’s Central Data Exchange (CDX), the point of entry for Agency environmental data exchanges. Together, CDX and the Exchange Network partners’ nodes are the infrastructure that enable efforts to collect, share and monitor the environmental data used to assess the impact of global warming, monitor the safety of our water supplies, gather geographic information on sources of pollution, and encourage overall excellence in the study and stewardship of our environment.

CGI Node 2.0 represents an expansion of this community to allow sharing across federal, state, commercial and citizen boundaries related to software development and technological innovation. It allows users to collaborate, publish, and discover environmental information and services across disparate systems. The node’s dashboard allows for quick and easy reporting, scheduling, and administration capabilities.

"Flexible and rapid data exchange capabilities are critical to responding to environmental challenges faced by government agencies and their trading partners," said Melanie Morris, Chief of Data Integration Division, Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. "Establishing the building blocks of an Open Source community that supports environmental collaboration and decision making will help stakeholders leverage their investments and capitalize on shared business drivers."

CGI Vice President Kenyon Wells added: "CGI is proud of our long history in helping EPA meet its mission of protecting the environment. Our open source software is the latest example of how CGI invests in the success of its clients and will allow Exchange Network partners to save money while promoting standardization for the sharing of important environmental data."

CGI will be hosting a Webinar to demonstrate the CGI Node 2.0 on June 4th. For more information about this event or about the Node product please refer to the CGI Environmental Practice Website: www.cgi.com/environment

Source: CGI GROUP INC. CONTACT: Peter Cutler, Director, Communications, (703) 227-6933, peter.cutler@cgifederal.com"

WebVisions 2008

I’ll be speaking and moderating a panel at the 8th annual WebVisions conference in Portland, Oregon tomorrow, Friday May 23, joined by Ward Cunningham of AboutUs.org, Brian Jamison of OpenSourcery, and Josh Bancroft of Intel. We’re doing a panel on “Why Open Source is Good for Open Content”.

Open Document Panel Video Released

During several days of last October’s Government Open Source Conference, we captured some of the sessions on video. We can’t cover them all, but I try to pick what we think will be of greatest interest after the conference is wrapped.

My first Flick Pick of the Week is the Executive Panel on Open Document Formats. It may be a bit backwards to start with the closing panel, but this topic will change soon enough so we didn’t want to sit on it too long. In fact since the panel was taped, the OpenDocument Foundation, which made news by taking a position for a different format altogether, has retired as an entity.

Participants included Adobe’s James King; IBM’s Arnaud LeHors; Microsoft’s Jason Matusow; OpenDocument Foundation’s Paul “Buck” Martin; and Sun Microsystems’ Douglas Johnson. Thanks again to the panelists. (I’m sorry Jason has been swamped but the other four panelists were able take time to weigh in on questions that had been collected from the audience but not always fully answered during the limited time at the conference.)

The GOSCON site provides the slide set, video and an open discussion thread (the latter a first for the conference web site - we shall see.) Mo info mo betta; you be the judge.

Open source gaining traction in U.S. government

Quantifying what the rest of us have known intuitively for some time; more than half US agencies have adopted some form of open source software, according to a Federal Open Source Alliance (FOSA) survey just released.

The top rationale for not adopting open-source software was organizational reluctance to change, according to the survey. This reflects my experience in early forays into the desktop arena in Oregon, as an example, where a pilot in a large agency netted positive technical and cost results, but management was dread to manage the inevitable reaction to change by personnel, trumping other benefits.

If you are interested in the base-line survey conducted by the FOSA, which is an industry partnership of HP, Intel and Red Hat, you may…

• read more about it in a recent Computer World article
• visit the FOSA web site to see the survey results (registration is required) or
• read about the results in FOSA Press Release.

Linux, Unix, and Sun

LinuxToday’s editor and contributor to many technical publications, Brian Proffitt covered GOSCON 2007 and continues to share pearls from his time with presenters and attendees. He has a gift for ferreting out the stories beyond the usual conference din. His original story can be found at serverwatch.com, I’m sharing the more intriguing portion here of his take on the use of Linux vs. Unix and Sun Solaris in the government environment based on conversations with some of the managers attending the conference in Portland, Oregon.
October 24, 2007
Enterprise Unix Roundup: Government Vibes, A New OS X
By Brian Proffitt

In an effort to actually live up to the proud name of Enterprise Unix Roundup, I thought this column would actually try to be a roundup.

Part of the rationale for such a structure this week is due to my recent return from Portland, having attended the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON). No official Unix news came out of GOSCON, although there was a brief exchange during a keynote of the conference that gave me a brief glimpse into what the public sector might be thinking in terms of Unix, Linux and Windows deployments. Read the rest of this entry »

GOSCON Post-Conference; Taiwan OSS Pjt

I’ll be writing about what I learned at our third annual Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) for weeks. Many thanks to the speakers, sponsors, and the attendees who traveled from the four corners of the world to learn and share what they’re doing.

During the conference I conducted an impromptu round-table BOF with some of our international guests; Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Japan and Taiwan were represented. Ryan Chung of Taiwan’s Institute of Information’s Open Source Group was kind enough to spend that evening in his room translating a  presentation on their National Open Source Promotion Project into English for the rest of us, very nice! and included here to share with you. More on the rest of the international delegation next week.

In the can for near-term distribution; podcasts, videos and presentations for sharing. Our attendees will have first crack at the presentations, then the general public will find them available for download in about three weeks on the GOSCON web site.

ODF |Open Document Format Debate at GOSCON

In the summer of 2005, I took on the challenge of creating the first Open Source Conference focused on government. My first phone call was to Linda Hamel from Massachusetts. Hamel had created a Legal Toolkit for state agencies which had become an outstanding reference. What I didn’t know at the time was that Massachusetts was about to embark on open standards journey that would draw the attention of government and private sector alike. After two years has become very clear to me that this issue of open the documents deserves maximum public exposure, public debate possible.

My thanks to go the industry players that are arm-wrestling over the issue, and to to the OpenDocument Foundation who will join, for bringing this important discussion to GOSCON on Tuesday, October 16th;

• Douglas W. Johnson, manager, Standards Strategy, Corporate Standards, Sun Microsystems
• Arnaud Le Hors, program director, Standards & Emerging Markets, IBM Open Source & Standards Project Office
• Buck “Marbux” Martin, director of legal affairs, OpenDocument Foundation
• Jason Matusow, senior director of interoperability, Microsoft Corporation

Here’s the full press release from earlier this week:

GOSCON Executive Panel Will Help Navigate the Sharp Turns in Open Document Debate

This year’s conference will close with today’s most pressing issue for international governments; panelists from Microsoft, Sun, IBM and the OpenDocument Foundation to weigh in
Read the rest of this entry »

Government Open Source Conference 2007

Some day I will join the ranks of diligent bloggers and post here with reasonable frequency. In the mean time, my writing efforts all flow to my favorite project, Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON). It’s coming up in just two weeks in Portland. The process of creating this hand-crafted event gives me plenty to share, but leaves little time to share it other than pushing session descriptions onto the conference web site. It puts me in touch with people all over the world that are doing interesting, compelling, innovative things that I think should hear about. Today, I’ll comment on the conference itself.

GOSCON remains a non-profit endeavor of Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSL). Why do we do it?

Community Building. OSL was created to support the open source community, consistent with the university’s generalized mission to build community. I joined OSL to extend that mission into the public sector. I think the opportunity for state and local government is tremendous, and providing education at the management level key to reasonable and successful deployment of OSS.

Platform for Collaboration: State and local governments have a desire to collaborate. This is not an easy task in the government environment but there are plenty of agencies ready to take it on if made less painful. We’re a long way from government 2.0, but we need to learn from every successful AND unsuccessful project and GOSCON is a place for these connections to take place, at the podium and in the hallways.

Open IT EcoSystem Building aka Market Building: Government will never go it alone on software acquisition, deployment, training, maintenance and support. Vendors who are uncomfortable with the idea that they may loose market share in the government space and react by spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about OSS are worrying about the wrong problem. When we gathered to create the first GOSCON in 2005, one state agency CIO asked me “How will (insert large traditional national IT consulting firm here) support me if we move to Open Source development and applications?” In 2006, the large national traditional IT consulting firm sent two representatives to attend, listen and learn (and so did medium size firms, application providers, small consultants - the list goes on). This year the registration list expands to include silicon valley start-ups and others that want to be part of the conversation.

How do we do it? With a lot of help from my friends, and their friends too.  More on that tomorrow.

Australia’s Open Source Initative Matures

CIO Magazine has noted Australia’s maturity in the Open Source Software in government, interviewing Gartner Research’s leading OSS analyst for that sector - Andrea DiMaio - in an article entitled “Public Sector Warms to Open Source“. It’s been over two years since the country released its “Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies”.

Sidebar: DiMaio will keynote at GOSCON (small shameless plug for an outstanding event) on October 16, 2007 in Portland, Oregon. We can expect to hear more on Australia’s leading effort, as well as the general challenges agencies face in adoption OSS (on the later, read: update internal skill sets).  To his point, GOSCON will host a supplemental workshop on Open Source Policy Development.

From the CIO article:

“Public sector and government organizations around the world are adopting increasingly mature open-source products, with Australia at the front of the trend.

And while Gartner recently warned governments of all stripes about the need for a greater focus on establishing OSS policies, the Australian government is confident it has the matter well in hand.

A recent Gartner survey found what it called “a remarkable lack of maturity” in establishing OSS policies in public-sector organizations. It warned while most clients had significant deployments of open source, there was a dearth of formal and comprehensive policies covering aspects such as inventory, procurement, vendor assessment and selection, OSS license risk assessment and management, liability limitation, and participation in OSS communities.” Read the rest of this entry »

The City of Newport News, Virginia “Open eGov” project merged with PloneGov

Andy Stein, IT Director for the City of Newport News, Virgina, shared the news of NN’s recently released eGov platform which has now joined PloneGov.  In his email today to colleagues Andy related…

“Open eGov is our initiative to create a collaboration of multiple local governments that share in the cost of software enhancements and operations for eGovernment functionality. By joining PloneGov, we merge with an existing project which has a membership of about 55 government organizations from multiple countries, all using the same technology and interested in collaboration.

Many of you already converted to a Content Management System. If not, then PloneGov may be an excellent alternative for you.

You may know about smaller organizations in your region which may be interested in this approach. I would appreciate you forwarding this note to the peer groups in your region.

The technology we use is very scalable and there is a strong base of large organizations running it. However the larger organizations seem to be favoring solutions that come from tier 1 vendors, which is the reason I am targeting medium size localities and smaller.”

Press Releases Available:

“The City of Newport News, Virginia “Open eGov” project merged with PloneGov “

Corresponding news item published on the PloneGov site