On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 2:20 PM, McGovern, James <james.mcgov...@hp.com> wrote: > I have decided to run for State Representative and often get questions from > other candidates regarding ways government can be made more efficient. Do > you think there is merit in technology groups such as Apache holding forums > to educate elected officials on the value of open source? >
I've done a bit of talking to elected officials in various states about open source and open standards. There is certainly *a lot* of misinformation out there and need for education. In a sense this "solves itself" in another 20 years, due to generational shifts. But in the mean time it is not uncommon to hear a state senator claim that they cannot use open source because "our documents are confidential and we can't have them read by just anyone" (!) Procurement procedures are also an issue in many places. In some jurisdictions the government doesn't buy directly from a vendor, but through a middleman. The middleman gets a cut from the vendor, so they have an incentive to work with that vendor's products. With open source there is no kickback, since the product is free of charge. Of course, we all know there are other business models, but they are not as familiar to government. Also, the RFQ process essentially shifts the cost of product research from the government to the vendor. The government writes up requirements and asks the vendor to provide detailed responses, describing how their product meets those requirements. The vendor spends days tracking down the details for the government, in hopes of getting picked. We sometimes also get such RFQ's sent to Apache projects. But, as volunteers, we have no interest or incentive in spending days responding to such requests. Again, the middleman is key here. As for forums, we could get a lot of bang for the buck if we had a table at the annual NASCIO conference: http://www.nascio.org/ This is the national organization of state CIO's. Another approach, for something local in CT, is to have university sponsorship of a workshop. Yale, for example, has done things related to open standards and government before. Regards, -Rob > > > http://facebook.com/McGovernForCT --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: community-unsubscr...@apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: community-h...@apache.org
