publicOSS

Some public institutions are taking seriously the idea of being “open” to the public. Two examples: NASA and the Library of the Congress.

NASA

As reported by WIRED, the people of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration published their first e-book (they expect to create a list of e-books related to aeronautics available to the public). The book, “X-15: Extending the Frontiers of Flight“  by Dennis R. Jenkins is available as a pdf file or in a Kindle friendly format.

Library of the Congress

In their own words: “In the spirit of transparency and community, the Library of Congress has established an internal process to create open source software. This will make it easier for software developers and sponsors within the Library to produce software that can be freely redistributed to users worldwide.” The Library of the Congress announced the news by a press release. They plan to use, in any case, the most permissive license possible (there are also code not completely developed by the Library’s staff).

So, books published by a public institution being released to the public (there is not information about NASA’s e-book license), and software developed by the government (and in some cases for the government) is being released as Open Source. Maybe, it is the beginning of a new trend.

Now vendors are complaining that UK does not enforce its own Open Source Policies. I am glad to see the private sector is “helping” the community. You can read the full article here.

Recently, I had the opportunity of listening a presentation about a particular e-government initiative. The project gathered several municipalities and centralized the processes for permission requests (construction-related permits and other red tape activities). The idea is really good. There is a centralized “cloud” that handles all the process and is shared by all municipalities. Therefore, there is only a single department in charge of the support of the system. All the local governments maybe have different requirements for their permits, but they agreed on standards for the forms and to limit the  kind of information that can be manipulated by the system.

The project has had a good reception, and they are proud of that. I congratulated them, but I was left with some questions. The speakers keep using the word “business” and “business model” during the whole talk. At the beginning I thought that was only a figure of speech, but then I asked about the license of the software developed for the project.  Of course it was not open at all.

My question is simple. Given the fact that you already invested money developing a solution for a governmental office (it does not matter the level), doesn’t it make sense to liberate the code? There are hundreds or municipalities that can take your code and improve it. You (the pioneers) can benefit from that. You are going to have an army of people improving your system, and also  you will collaborate with fellow citizens.

People forget that the business of government is not business as usual.

I thought that the only kind of institution that could initiate the Open Textbook thing was a governmental one. I found out my mistake when I check CK12. This is a non-profit organization that is taking the idea of free content further; beginning with early education. You can check their website where they explain their idea in a plain, simple way:

CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide. Using an open-content, web-based collaborative model termed the “FlexBook,” CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning.

Of course, I am not sure if this initiative would be sustainable or if in the near future someone is going to change the  licensing scheme. Nevertheless, the idea of this “group of visionary advisors and highly accomplished Silicon Valley engineers” is really good. Teachers (well most of them) know better  about the quality of their textbooks and what changes can be done to improve them. Collaboration, usually leads to better products.

There are also some problems about contents that will surface eventually (evolution someone?). For example,  I don’t know about the website keeping the right of all content, as they said in their Terms of Use. Could that mean that the owner can eventually sell the content? That’s not the kind of openness we are looking for.

I told a friend about CK-12 and how I thought that only governments were able to initiate this kind of projects, she told me: “well, Silicon Valley is like a country in its own”.

Four years ago I wrote the first paper of my PhD program. It was a final paper for IST 501 (one of the best classes I ever had). We had to pick a topic related to information technology and any of the topic of the hundreds of papers we had read in class. I decided to write about Information Technology and politics. I finished with a 26 pages document that got me a good grade but never did it in the big leagues (journal, conference, or even a poster).

Given the results of the election in United States and the important role that the Internet played on it, I want to put the paper online. So people interested on writing about it can have a starting point (at least on the references).

IT as a growing political factor

I came back from Manchester. The IGov Research Institute 2008 (the i is for International, Interdisciplinary, Innovative) took place at this nice city, specifically at the University of Salford. During eight days speakers from the academic and government side lectured and carried out activities related to the government, communities in general, and technology. In this venue, the topics were broad: research methodologies, GIS in the government, urban regeneration, perspectives of private-public partnerships, communities using Internet tool to reach government (I will write later about the “community reports” later), and social perspectives of the Internet (Bowling Alone vs. Bowling Together).

The experience was academically and personally enriching. It helped me to included new perspectives to my thinking about the information technology – government problem. I recommend the event to any PhD student that is interested in the topic.

I want to thank to the Center for Technology in Government for the opportunity and to the College of Information Sciences and Technology of Penn State for the support.