Re: Political Candidate Relations
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
Re: Political Candidate Relations
On 07/02/2014 02:20 PM, McGovern, James 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? http://facebook.com/McGovernForCT I know that this isn't an answer to your question, but ... I strongly recommend Jason Hibbets' book The Foundation for an Open Source City. He keynoted at ApacheCon in Denver, and I would be glad to put you in touch with him. He thinks a lot about this topic, and has met with many government officials about applying the principles of Open Source to government. We also had another talk at ApacheCon on this topic, although at this moment I can't remember who gave that talk. -- Rich Bowen - rbo...@rcbowen.com - @rbowen http://apachecon.com/ - @apachecon
Political Candidate Relations
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? http://facebook.com/McGovernForCT
Re: Political Candidate Relations
Yes, good idea. On Jul 2, 2014, at 11:20 AM, 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? http://facebook.com/McGovernForCT
Re: Political Candidate Relations
James, In my opinion, government is more a management issue than advancing ideals and personal agendas. If this is possible, which I honestly doubt, things can get better. *Héctor M. Arroyo, BSIT/SE* *(352) 304-9427* On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Andrew Musselman andrew.mussel...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, good idea. On Jul 2, 2014, at 11:20 AM, 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? http://facebook.com/McGovernForCT
Re: Political Candidate Relations
I think that's the wrong question. We're (mostly) a bunch of programmers and know sod all about governance (much as each/most of us will happily expound on what we think we know :) ). I imagine however that many of us would happily offer up some time to hear about the problems that government faces being efficient and share anecdotes and history from our communities that may have useful analogies within the problems being faced by government. For example - I was at a conference where a government group were considering how they could best open source their legacy system and get 'the community' (quotes mine) to help with a rewrite. The press, media and our own self-marketing has convinced people that there are magic community elves waiting to do whatever work might come their way. I made the point that they had to start by identifying the community being talked about; and that that community should be the ones who feel the pain of an inadequate product and want to scratch it (shallow example in the interest of brevity :) ). Hen On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 11:20 AM, 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? http://facebook.com/McGovernForCT
