GovHub: Open Source and Open Government Collaboration

GovHub is an Open Source software advocacy group designed to encourage and facilitate the adoption of Open Government principals and Open Source software within government and non-profit agencies. The GovHub partners are Greg Lind a web based software developer and architect, currently employed by Metro Regional Government in Portland, Oregon. John Miller formerly of Lewis and Clark College and Metro and Jarhid Brown from Metro and formerly the Department of Defense. Description:The GovHub presentation will have an introduction to the general ideals of GovHub and what we hope it will be, and then use 3 roles or characters to describe the problems when governments and open source developers try to work together and how GovHub and other collaboration tools like it can help solve those problems. The first character will be the open source developer, who is trying to work with government data and services for his open source project as well as trying to propose open source tools as solutions for existing software RFP's. The second character is a government analyst who wants to use open source tools and understands the advantages of standards compliant and interoperable software but is having trouble convincing management the value of software that is "free" and that support and long term contracts are possible. He is also struggling with how to collaborate with other governments who have already developed some of the tools he needs, but can't get an inter-government agreement to share code or data and desperately wants to collaborate. The third character is the GovHub entity who wants to help facilitate collaboration between governments and open source software developers as well as provide business resources to help create and get contracts and ensure long term sustainability throughout a projects life cycle. The back and forth between the characters would emphasize the common need for a place for these users to go to collaborate on projects and find mutually beneficial paths to financial and informational success. The end message would be for developers and public agencies to fuse tools like GovHub and others to get around the political red tape and get down to the real problem of creating better information systems for the public and the agencies themselves.