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Government Code Collaborative Falls Short
Tom Adelstein writes "This story starts off singing the praises of the Government Open Code Collaborative, then reminds the reader: you discover that it has built one more bureaucracy to oversee its existing bureaucracy, with oversight over the new bureaucracy. Have you ever heard the cliche about prisoners running the asylum? Well, this gated and restrictive open-source government repository fits."
GOCC also stands for Great Ohio Coaster Club. Coincidence? I think not. Someone's taking us for a ride.
did we just Slashdot a government site?
The govenrnment does not need to do more iota more than this: make it's code open source; be receptive to using open source and accepting open source contributions.
We the open source community get the fruits what we paid tax dollars to produce, and the government doesn't waste money on redundant proprietary code. Everybody wins. Adding bureaucracy to something that is clearly a partnership with the community is just dumb.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
... go to www.gocc.gov instead - they apparantly don't know how to set DNS servers at the government, and require a www. in front... :)
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com
The bureaucracy is expanding to fulfill the needs of an ever expanding bureaucracy.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Government Code Collaborative Falls Short
[sarcasm] =-O [/sarcasm]
-Colin
...if they actually had something useful there, and if it worked. And if they recognized that they are A government and not THE government.
rewriting history since 2109
I know of two other psuedo open repositories another section of our government already has. These have been up for a couple of years and both are under utilized.
then reminds the reader: you discover that it has built one more bureaucracy to oversee its existing bureaucracy, with oversight over the new bureaucracy. Have you ever heard the cliche about prisoners running the asylum?
/raises hand.
Everyone who works in a Fortune 1000 company, please raise your hand. Anyone who thinks that their employer COULDNT be any more bureauratic please raise their hand.
Implying Governments are INHERENTLY bureaucratic is a myth, conversly, arguing that a PRIVATE firm (of any notable size) isnt just as complex is silly. The Short: All big systems are complex and byzantine.
No, I did not. I thought it was the inmates running the asylum. Or may be I am mistaken and Ken Kesey was more accurate regarding conditions in American mental hospitals.
...like DARPA does with Cougaar.
Government sponsored open source is already here... good times!
The Army reading list
Wow! 20% of the government software was OS X specific! :)
Sounds like the recent discussion about the FDA needing oversite. They are the overseeing body.
Just after the linuxjournal article is a reasonable response by Christopher Fowler, one of the participants. Basically he says that the GOCC is just a small part of open source use within government, that it's all volunteer, and that it has its own niche. Well, better see what he had to say, I'm probably mangling it beyond recognition. I get the picture that it's a positive but slow step in the right direction.
Yes, there are only five pieces of software. But they are under an open source license and you can download them. That's all as it should be.
Yes, you have to go through paperwork in order to participate in the project. So what? Every open source effort has some gatekeepers that decide who can participate and what they can contribute. When it comes to government, you can't have a Linux or Theo just making decisions, you actually have to have paperwork, because we have open government that needs to be transparent, not a monarchy. See the connection? Democracy, openness, record keeping? Records and paperwork are the price we pay for openness. In most cases, that paperwork is not just a good idea, it is required because we, the people, passed laws to require it.
GOCC probably will not succeed in its current form. But people are at least interested and trying and that's a good thing. If you have good ideas and are interested, I'm sure you could find a way to participate.
Instead, of course, you are just using this effort as a soapbox to complain and whine. Ditto for Tom Adelstein, the author of the LJ piece, which is also full of tirades and platitudes, but empty of ideas and solutions.
The open source movements needs contributors, not whiners. If have ideas for how to improve GOCC or build something similar with less bureaucracy, present them. Even better, get involved in the project: talk to your local government, run for office, get something on the ballot, etc. Government really is no different from an open source project: things only change if you contribute. Whining and complaining will just piss people off, and if there is too much of it, you endanger the entire project.
The whole idea behind open source is "open," and that's the part GOCC lacks. Nobody can contribute to it without significant restrictions like accepting liability for the code. Open source has NO WARRANTY for a reason. You want a warranty or technical support, you buy it. In addition they have provided no way to build a community around their offerings.
GOCC is virtually unchanged from when I looked at it six months ago, and I wouldn't be too surprised if everybody just kind of ignored it.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
>The point is not to infuse bureaucracy into open source, it is to use open source in government.
Always a good idea, albeit not always possible...
I'm sorry, but your comment is not insightful. It might be "outsightful", as I can only suspect you never held a public position.
>The governnment does not need to do more iota more than this: make it's code open source; be receptive to using open source and accepting open source contributions.
What is "the government"? You talk as if it were a whole, a beast having will... it's not! I'm pro-Linux, some colleagues are pro-proprietary (that was fun-funny, huh?) I have friends who say OpenOffice.org will never work... without even trying!
> We the open source community get the fruits what we paid tax dollars to produce, and the government doesn't waste money on redundant proprietary code. Everybody wins. Adding bureaucracy to something that is clearly a partnership with the community is just dumb.
No, it's not. It's necessary. Don't know about the States, but in my country there are legal procedures which must be followed. Policies must be implemented, procedures must be enforced and resources allocated. Doing so in partnership with _any_ community is out of question, because such community is not part of the government and, as such, it cannot influence public funds allocation.
It sucks, but restrictive laws are necessary to avoid corruption. Too bad the good guys get drowned in bureaucracy in consequence...
this site
has some cool looking stuff available.
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Research/Software/
But you have to jump through hoops to get it.
In fact, I think that there will always be a problem with "US government" and "open source" at the same time, specifically that the government doesnt want stuff it writes internally (or has written for it by a contractor and owns copyright for) released to people, organizations and countries on that list of "people, organizations and countries we dont like right now" that it has somewhere. (the one places like cuba & iran and people like bin laden are on) because those people, organizations or countries might use this unspecified code to do unspecified "bad things".
Its the same thinking as to why there are still encryption export regulations in the US right now.
When we hear rumors of someone elses code that might possibly be useful (and this happens infrequently, and unofficially via the grapevine) we have to make "official" requests through an unfortunately large hierarchy. We are usually met with "why do you want this? This was developeed with funds from program XYZ and you can't use it. This model has not been validated and we can't release it...."
And this is internal to ONE organization! When we make similar requests to our external sister labs of equal size and bureaucratic depth the problem scales exponentially.
It's very frustrating and I wish I could come up with a way to fix it.
In that movie "Catch me if you can", when Frank is in prison, FBI offers him to "Serve out the rest of his sentence as a federal employee" [at the FBI]. My parents, who are both federal employees, had a good [sad, knowing] laugh over this one.
Let me quote from an exchange from a hearing on Texas' SB 1579 (the Open-Source bill):
All elected officials care about is getting reelected. To do that takes cash and guess where that comes from?
Yeah, right.
>
>Implying Governments are INHERENTLY bureaucratic is a myth, conversly, arguing that a PRIVATE firm (of any notable size) isnt just as complex is silly. The Short: All big systems are complex and byzantine.
Complexity is not the same as bureaucracy. Even in F1000 companies, bureaucracy is a bug, not a feature. (It's just harder to eliminate in larger companies.)
Large government contractors and suppliers fall somewhere between private enterprise and government in this scale; they have to be efficient enough to actually build a bomb that goes "boom", or a plane that flies, but they also have to be bureaucratic enough to fill out the reams of paperwork that come as part of the Faustian bargain: If you want a chunk of the taxpayer's money, you've gotta dedicate at least 20-30% of your manpower to jumping through the government's hoops.
In government per se, bureaucracy is not merely a feature -- it's practically the raison d'etre for the whole enterprise. What good is open source if we can't have studies on it, build fiefdoms around approving and sharing it, and make other people from other fiefdoms fill out paperwork to get their hands on it? What good are space shuttles unless we build space stations for them to go to, and space stations without space shuttles to ferry the parts up there $500M at a time?
Remember, there's Fedland from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
And there's the Real McCoy: (Excerpted from Meat, Poultry, Egg Produce Labeling Review Process)
Everyone who's worked in both a Fortune 1000 company and government, and who has obtained approval for the funding of a working group to ascertain the value of conducting a study on the relative levels of bureaucratization, please contact your union steward for permission to obtain form G3122 ("Application for Exception to Standard Rule 7431, section 8, supbaragraph 6") before even thinking about raising your hand.
I am responsible for the GOCC server uptime.
That beind said, Tom is a city IT type. Cities get freebies from MS and such all the time because they go right into the school systems.
When you get to the level of state government all bets are off.
The RI Sec. of State's office is a 100% open source shop. I love it so.
Opening the source of government written software is the right thing to do: taxpayer dollars spent, so taxpayers should get the software. On my short list, government software that is well-known/useful to me:
1. PubMed's e-utils
2. NIST software, which includes OCR, and handprint recognition software, and fingerprint imaging software.
Linux at home
"Well, this gated and restrictive open-source government suppository fits."
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
Is it really that hard for the government to put together a small agency under the Library of Congress that keeps a federal record of all code projects and receives updates from every department? All that would have to be done to keep it up to date would be for the Congress to require each department that does its own IT work to keep in contact with the agency in each appropriations bill for new software projects.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!