Obama, McNealy, and Cognitive Dissonance

Gene Quinn's recent post titled "What Happened to the Obama Open Source Initiative?" criticizes, in turns, open source software, Scott McNealy, the Obama administration, and "business newbies" who want to use the open source software model. Early in the Administration, President Obama asked Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, to prepare a report on … Continue reading Obama, McNealy, and Cognitive Dissonance →

Good design is hard on all of us.

Tim Lee is, for my money, one of the most reasonable and thoughtful tech policy essayists we have. His latest, "Open User Interfaces Suck" got my attention, because he hits me right where I live. In his usual, respectful, level-headed way, he claims that open systems (like the open source development process I love so … Continue reading Good design is hard on all of us. →

Citizen and government collaboration: let’s work it out.

Over the last couple years, many of us involved with open source in government have had discussions about what it means for citizen coders to become involved in state, local and federal efforts. There are all kinds of legal, ethical, and logistics questions that haven't been answered. Everyone seems to be solving them individually, but … Continue reading Citizen and government collaboration: let’s work it out. →

The future of the government forges

The GSA is currently planning forge.gov, which is widely assumed to be based on forge.mil, the much-discussed collaboration platform from the Defense Information Systems Agency, or DISA. forge.mil is a pretty incredible idea: a single destination for testing, certification, and software development in the Defense Department. It sounds obvious, but the idea remains revolutionary. For … Continue reading The future of the government forges →

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 to bring open source and the US Department of Defense together. You can sign up for the mailing list here. If you use your imagination and insert a lot of stumbling, fumbling, and … Continue reading Fighting Forks →

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. The success of Snort and its commercial wing, SourceFire, is one of the early successes of open source, especially in security. On July 5th, the Open Information Security Foundation, a consortium of companies and … Continue reading Open Source Pork →

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 cost-savings. I think you could make a more expansive argument that includes risk mitigation and innovation, but describing the advantage to unions is an interesting angle I hadn't seen before. I noticed that … Continue reading Open Source in Government: Who was first? →

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 today. Lockheed is a very conservative company, and while they're happy to use open source internally and on projects for their customers, this is their first experiment with actually running a project themselves. … Continue reading Lockheed Goes Open Source. Blankenhorn Hates It. →

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 in its ability to generate buzz and get everyone excited about topics that they've never heard of. I though I'd post the sessions that I plan to attend. You can subscribe to my … Continue reading Rough Guide to Gov 2.0 Expo: Open Source Edition →