Government Open Code Collaborative

I read an interesting article in The Economist today. It addresses the value of the Open Source “collaborative process”. Some of these concepts were briefly addressed in my presentation to the group on February 2.

It is a 5 page article and you may not have the time for it. Here is a quote of the few, most significant paragraphs with potential applicability to us:

“Rather than a democracy, open source looks like a Darwinian meritocracy. The tools for extremely productive online collaboration exist. What is still missing are ways to “identify and deploy not just manpower, but expertise,” says Beth Noveck of New York University Law School (who is applying open-source practices to scrutinising software-patent applications, with an eye to invalidating dubious ones). In other words, even though open-source is egalitarian at the contributor level it can nevertheless be elitist when it comes to accepting contributions. In this way, many open-source projects look more hierarchical than the corporate organograms the approach is supposed to have torn up.

Even if the cracks in the management of open source can be plugged by some fairly straightforward organisational controls, might it nevertheless remain only a niche activity—occupying, essentially, the space between a corporation and a commune? There are two doubts about its staying power.

The first is how innovative it can remain in the long run. Indeed, open source might already have reached a self-limiting state, says Steven Weber, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of “The Success of Open Source” (Harvard University Press, 2004). “Linux is good at doing what other things already have done, but more cheaply—but can it do anything new? Wikipedia is an assembly of already-known knowledge,” he says.

The second doubt is whether the motivation of contributors can be sustained. Companies are good at getting people to rise at dawn for a day's dreary labour. But the benefit of open-source approaches is that they can tap into a far larger pool of resources essentially at no cost. Once the early successes are established, it is not clear that the projects can maintain their momentum, says Christian Alhert, the director of Openbusiness.cc, which examines the feasibility of applying open-source practices to commercial ventures.

But there are arguments in favour of open source, too. Ronald Coase, a Nobel prize-winning economist, noted that firms will handle internally what it would otherwise cost more to do externally through the market. The open-source approach seems to turn this insight on its head and it does so thanks to the near-zero cost of shipping around data. A world in which communication is costly favours collaborators working alongside each other; in a world in which it is essentially free, they can be in separate organisations in the four corners of the earth.

Perhaps that is why open source is taking up a permanent place as a facet of modern business. As open source begins to look more corporate, corporations themselves are looking to adopt and adapt more open-source practices.”

The two “limitations” suggested above I would address as follows:

1) Can “the Open Source process” do anything new, can it innovate? The answer may be negative, I am not sure. We as an organization can always innovate, without relying on the “community” to deliver those innovations to us. It is the other part of the quote that interests me: “Linux is good at doing what other things already have done, but more cheaply … Wikipedia is an assembly of already-known knowledge”. If we can do more cheaply the “already invented and well established” business of local government in the style of Linux and Wikipedia, we would have saved money.

2) Can we sustain the motivation of contributors? In our case, the contributors would be other local governments who share the cost of developing or maintaining a common software application. Out of more then 50 local governments in Virginia and more then 20,000 in the US, I believe it is likely that we will find a small group which is equally concerned with the escalating cost of software and is willing to collaborate and save.

I am not offering this article as “proof” that Open Source is “the way to go”. Nor am I inviting a debate on the subject. In my judgment, adopting a collaborative process, where applicable, is the best opportunity I am aware of that could potentially limit the increase in our software costs in the future. Open Source is one popular collaborative model, but it is not the only one.

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Every system needs to have its own set of checks and balances in order and I think the treatment of this case should be no different.

Sorry but can someone give other mirror to this article ? It is not accessable anymore...

Cheers, Ernest Musial. Do not spam! If you want to get a gov backlink just post some sensable comment and then link...

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Law School (who is applying open-source practices to scrutinising software-patent applications, with an eye to invalidating dubious ones). In other words, even though open-source is egalitarian at the contributor level it can nevertheless be elitist when it comes to accepting contributions. In this way, many open-source projects look more hierarchical than the corporate organograms the approach is supposed to have torn up. Cheers,Ernest Musial You are welcome to visit our SEO Directory to submit your site. You might also visit Free SEO Directory if you want to submit your sites for free. You can also visit free Polish directory Darmowy Katalog Stron

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