Fighting Forks
This is the ignite presentation I gave for the Mil-OSS WG2 conference today. It’s a tremendous group of sandal-shod revolutionaries who want …
Open Source Pork
The adorably named “Snort” project has been the mainstay of open source intrusion detection systems for as long as I can remember. …
Open Source in Government: Who was first?
Brian Purchia of Burson-Marsteller has a post over on GovFresh about the value of open source to unions. His argument pivots on …
Lockheed Goes Open Source. Blankenhorn Hates It.
I was really pleased to read the announcement that Lockheed Martin’s social networking platform, EurekaStreams, was released as an open source project …
Rough Guide to Gov 2.0 Expo: Open Source Edition
Gov 2.0 Expo is coming to Washington, DC next week. It’s the latest offering from the O’Reilly event machine, which is unmatched …
Open Source headlines from the Open Government plans
The Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive ordered Federal agencies to produce open government plans by April 7th, and while some advocates are disappointed, …
Open source matters to open government. Really.
“Open source and open government are not the same,” I’ve been reading recently. When discussing the role of open standards in open …
Sunlight Week: accountability for earmarks
Earmarks are a notorious vehicle for pork, in part because they lay nestled inside opaque legislative prose. In the FY2010 budget, WashingtonWatch’s …
Developers for Glory
Although it may be simple to conflate the Apps for Democracy and Apps for America contests with the exciting new Apps for …
Software isn’t a skyscraper
Michael Daconta at GCN has posted a brief call to arms for the software industry. Here’s the gist: Although I am a …
Education and the iPad’s Architecture of Control
Like most of Jonathan Ive’s work, the iPad is beautiful. Like most of Apple’s work, it also makes me uneasy. I was …
What the Open Government Directive Means for Open Source
On the heels of the Open Government Memo of January 21st, 2009, the Obama Administration has issued the Open Government Directive. The …
What you need to know about the 2009 DOD OSS Memo
In mid-October, the U.S. Department of Defense CIO released a memo on the use of open source software in the DOD. The …
Read My Ramblings About CONNECT
Here’s a really nice writeup on the CONNECT Code-a-thon at iHealthBeat. They quote me a lot, which is what makes it really …
My OSCON 2009 Talk on Open Source in Government
The good people at O’Reilly have posted my Open Source in Government talk at OSCON 2009 on blip.tv. It’s also on YouTube. …
Open Source on the Battlefield
In Iraq, Sergeant 1st Class Martin Stadtler had nothing. He was stationed near Mosul, at a base that covers 24 square kilometers. Surrounding the base was a wall, and at intervals along that wall stood watchtowers. Those towers were improvised; they were large concrete water pipes, stood on their ends.
Inside each tower is a pair of soldiers. They’re watching for insurgents. To communicate with the home base, they had standard-issue tactical radios. Unfortunately, these radios couldn’t reach home base — the base was too big. Soldiers had to play a game of Telephone to reach the base: one tower radios the next until they are finally in range of the home base. Obviously, this would not do.
The NSA’s Security Challenge
Using open source software, the National Security Agency was able to gather a community of professional and amateur security experts together to …
The Navy’s Standardization Problem
Using open source software, the US Navy was able to standardize the shipboard systems on its new destroyers, reducing the complexity of …