**Register for GovLoop Online Training – How and Why to Bring Open Source to Your Agency – February 24th at 2pm – presented by RedHat/Carahsoft**
2010 was a banner year for open source in government. The growth of Open Source for America, the rise of Drupal as an open-source content management system with implementations from the White House to Energy Department, as well as San Francisco and State of California announcing open source policies.
Plus some of the fastest growing companies like Facebook primarily run on an open-source stack.
However, I still notice in our open source groups on GovLoop (whether our broad open source group or groups like Drupal) there is still a lot of education that needs to be done inside agencies. Often, there is an evangelist within an organization who is passionate about open source but keeps running into internal roadblocks.
These roadblocks are usually in the form of two types of questions :
1-Why use open source tools? Often IT leaders don’t know the advantages of open source to their infrastructure and only see the risks.
2-How to use open source tools? There’s often questions regarding who do we call for support? How do we get updates to the current version? How do we deal with bugs?
Honestly, I ran into these questions when I was trying to implement an open source wiki at my last government job. And I didn’t have the ammo to win the debate.
So on February 24th, we are going to help answer these questions. If you have these questions yourself, we have answers. If you are an evangelist, we will help arm you with answers and examples to help push your argument.
It should be fun and we got a great group of speakers – John Scott from Open Source for America, Andrew Hoppin – former NY State Senate CIO and previously the founder of an open source consulting company, and Gunnar Hellekson, Chief Technology Strategist for Red Hat and Federal 100 Winner.
And for those that haven’t been to one yet, we always have a lot of fun in our training. You learn a lot, get a certificate, plus it’s edutainment. Register for free…
In the meanwhile, would love to hear your answer to the two questions above (Why and How?)
It’s important to address the next step as well — government needs to participate fully in open source by not just using open source tools, but also putting government-developed software into open source repositories and participating in public open source development projects. Note that Source Forge has fed-friendly TOS, and others are under negotiation. https://forum.webcontent.gov/?page=TOS_SourceForge
As an aside, CENDI issued great FAQs on open source in government. http://www.cendi.gov/publications/09-1FAQ_OpenSourceSoftware_FINAL_110109.pdf