solvitur ambulando
Where IT and government collide — mostly at the doorstep of system integrators.
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
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
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?
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.
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
The Obama Administration's Open Government Directive ordered Federal agencies to produce open government plans by April 7th, and while some advocates are disappointed, we have before us a bewildering number of initiatives to improve transparency, collaboration, and participation across the Government. It will not surprise you to learn that I spent some time looking for places … Continue reading Open Source headlines from the Open Government plans
"Open source and open government are not the same," I've been reading recently. When discussing the role of open standards in open government transparency projects, Bob Caudill at Adobe, is concerned that open source and open standards are being conflated. He likes open standards just fine, but: "Open standards are driving for interoperability between systems … Continue reading Open source matters to open government. Really.
Earmarks are a notorious vehicle for pork, in part because they lay nestled inside opaque legislative prose. In the FY2010 budget, WashingtonWatch's crowdsourcing effort identified 40,000 separate earmarks -- about 75 for every elected official. There was a lot of talk about earmark prohibitions earlier this week, and each party swears it will be responsible … Continue reading Sunlight Week: accountability for earmarks
Although it may be simple to conflate the Apps for Democracy and Apps for America contests with the exciting new Apps for Army contest, they really couldn't be more different. Together they represent an exciting experiment in what it takes to pull communities together around a problem. Though they all offer cash prizes to the … Continue reading Developers for Glory
Michael Daconta at GCN has posted a brief call to arms for the software industry. Here's the gist: Although I am a believer in free markets and the benefits of competition, industry has a responsibility to work together on the foundational layers to build security, quality and reliability from the ground up to advance the … Continue reading Software isn’t a skyscraper
a technology job is no excuse 