Category: Collaboration Zones

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Journal: Open Source Software Gains in Government

Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, IO Sense-Making, Mobile

Uncle Sam meets open source with open arms

Collaboration for the common good — what open source is all about

Eric Gries

It seems everywhere I look, I see another example of government adopting open source.

Earlier this month, a consortium of public and non-profit organizations launched Civic Commons, a public-private partnership that will help governments share software they have developed. It's a terrific idea that will foster innovation, eliminate duplicate effort, and save money. And it's another great example of the growing adoption of open source software in governments.

Examples of open source in the U.S. government abound. The Smithsonian and Search.USA.gov use Solr/Lucene open source enterprise search. The White House re-launched whitehouse.gov using Drupal. The DoD and the Intelligence Community have proposed an Open Technology Development roadmap “to increase technical efficiency and reduce software lifecycle costs within DoD,” and the DoD has developed forge.mil to “enable continuous collaboration among all stakeholders including project managers, developers, testers, certifiers, operators, and users.” In fact, my own company, Lucid Imagination, is funded in part by In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, further evidence that open source and government are going hand in hand.

Examples of open source abroad is equally as evident. The EU's Open Source Observatory and Repository provides public administrations with access to more than two thousand free and open source applications and the open source CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval) research project is making mounds of data stored in EU archives accessible.

Read Balance of Posting

Tip of the hat to Bob Gourley at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: While good news, the above is over-stated.  Free/Open Source Softwaare (F/OSS) needs a champion with weight, such as Microsoft or IBM or one of the telecommunications giants who sees that the value chain has moved from connectivity to content.  There are eight tribes of intelligence, the government is the least important.

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Journal: Third Party Desired by 58% in America + ReCap

Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government

Michael Ostrolenk Recommends

Large Majority of Americans Thinks Country Needs Viable Third Party

By: Jon Walker Monday September 20, 2010 1:03 pm

A large majority of Americans, 58 percent, believe that the country needs a third major party to adequately represent the American people, according to a new Gallup poll. Only 35 percent think the Democratic and Republican Parties do an adequate job representing the electorate.

The desire for a third party is high because currently both parties are unpopular with the American people. A recent CBS News/New York Times poll found that both the Democratic and Republican Parties favorability numbers were negative. Perhaps more importantly, it found that overwhelming majorities disapproved of the job performance of Congressional Republicans and Democrats.

. . . . . . .

The problem is systemic.

See Also:

Event: 30 Oct Restoring Sanity Rally with Jon Stewart, Keep Fear Alive Rally with Stephen Colbert

Reference: Electoral Reform Act of 2009

2008 ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig
Review: Grand Illusion–The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny
Review: Running on Empty–How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It (Paperback)

and also:
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Journal: US Research & Development in the Toilet

03 Economy, 05 Energy, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government

U.S. innovation: On the skids

Technologists look to a new White House to reverse decade-long slide in R&D

By Gary Anthes, ComputerWorld, October 21, 2008

By most measures, the U.S. is in a decade-long decline in global technological competitiveness. The reasons are many and complex, but central among them is the country's retreat from long-term basic research in science and technology, coupled with a surge in R&D by countries such as China.

Tip of the Hat to Lynn Wheeler at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: This ties in perfectly with US secret intelligence fraud, waste, and abuse (hand-outs to corporations for vapor-ware, see our quick study 2010: OPINION–America’s Cyber Scam); and also with Chuck Spinney's long-standing concerns about the plans-reality mismatch and the criminal insanity of raising two generations of engineers who know nothing but “government specification cost plus” production.

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Journal: Government as Client, Three Levels of Smart

Cultural Intelligence, Government, Methods & Process

Steve Denning

Radical management: what to do when your customer is the government

One constraint on implementing radical management is that the customer is on a different path altogether. A frequent example is where your customer is a government bureaucracy. You are aspiring to delight your client, and your client is saying, “Don’t bother with me such questions. Just deliver what the specifications ask for.”

. . . . . .

…realistically, most government organizations are not even trying to practice radical management. One way of understanding how they function is to recognize that organizations operate at three levels, using a schema proposed by Ranjay Gulati in Reorganize For Resilience: Putting Customers At The Center Of Your Business (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009)

Level 1: “You take what we make.”

Level 2:  “We believe that our offerings will be useful to you.”

Level 3: “We seek to understand and solve your problems with our offerings”

While radical management is operating at level 3, most government organizations are still stranded at level 1. They are paying scant attention to their stakeholders. Often they have not even taken any decision as to who their primary stakeholders are. As a result, no one really knows what the purpose of the organization is. The managers in such organizations typically follow rules and procedures, rather than systematically consider: how could we deliver more value sooner? These organizations are the quintessential bureaucracy, and the management is quintessentially Dilbertian.

Phi Beta Iota: The government is full of good people trapped in a bad system.  We've decided that in addition to educating the five billion poor one cell call at a time, we have to give government employees an easy to use cell tether to a World Brain that helps them evolve the consciousness of government from the bottom up.

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Journal: US Ruling Class versus Country Class–Deep Insights, Need Integrity and Fact-Based Deliberation

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Officers Call, Open Government, Policy, Reform, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Full Story Online

America's Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

By Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 – August 2010 issue of American Spectator

EXTRACT 1:  They [the bi-opoly two parties] think, look, and act as a class.

EXTRACT 2: The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

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Journal: Supreme Court May Smack Executive Down

09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Officers Call

Marcus Aurelius Recommends

Smackdown of Obama by Supreme Court may be inevitable

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According to sources who watch the inner workings of the federal government, a smackdown of Barack Obama by the U.S. Supreme Court may be inevitable.

Ever since Obama assumed the office of President, critics have hammered him on a number of Constitutional issues. Critics have complained that much if not all of Obama's major initiatives run headlong into Constitutional roadblocks on the power of the federal government.

Phi Beta Iota: Our Contributing Editor received the entire story via email but without a date from a Colonel serving in Afghanistan.  This story is evidently circulating among military personnel and for that reason we take note.  However, we note that it was originally posted9 July 2010, and have linked to that original post rather than post the entire email.  We would observe that ever since Dick Cheney was Chief of Staff in the White House, Executive disrespect for the Constitution and Congress has been growing, and that Newt Gingrich was the one who led Congress to its practice of abdicating its Article 1 role in the Constitution, instead playing foot-soldier to a party president.  We reiterate, there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed by Electoral Reform.