Posted by andy Tue, 18 Oct 2005 15:40:00 GMT

The GOSCON event was a great success, with about 200 attendees, about twice the expected turnout. Below are some observations that might be relevant for for Massachusetts. Linda Hamel, Massachusetts ITD general counsel, was a star of the show. There is a consensus that Massachusetts has set the …

The GOSCON event was a great success, with about 200 attendees, about twice the expected turnout. Below are some observations that might be relevant for for Massachusetts.

Linda Hamel, Massachusetts ITD general counsel, was a star of the show. There is a consensus that Massachusetts has set the standard for open standards policy making. A lot of people wanted to learn more about Massachusetts’ policy, and I spoke with a Red Hat VP who had just gotten back from Malaysia with a report that “they didn’t want to hear about Red Hat. They wanted to hear about Massachusetts.”

BRINGING STATE AGENCIES TOGETHER
About half of the attendees were from various Oregon government agencies, and the crowd included a number of agency CIOs. The event delivered value for the state of Oregon as education, a way to agree on the key issues, and venue for organizing relatively sophisticated joint efforts. I suspect that Massachusetts could get a lot of value from a similar, locally targeted event.

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Oregon has been developing an economic “cluster” around open source. They view it as a source of jobs and have put some state resources behind it, including official economic development staff with slick brochures. I have two different impressions of this effort. The first is that the number of jobs is very modest – at most 200. If dropped into the larger Massachusetts software industry, the job count wouldn’t be statistically perceptible. On the other hand, the synergies really work and the gears meshed. I met with the CEO of Compiere, who had just moved his company from Connecticut to an incubator in Portland, a short walk from the conference. The conference was organized by the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University, hosted by Portland State, attended by stage and local agencies, and populated with local small open source companies.

PROCUREMENT
There was discussion of procurement processes. The Oregon Department of Transportation CIO stood up and asked “how can I get these guys (Compiere) to respond to an RFP?” One obvious observation is that open source software is so cheap that the vendors can’t afford to respond to RFP’s. By design, the software is bought, not sold. The open source model often requires that users do more of their own evaluations, which requires specific internal skills, or consultants who do research. The requirement to consider open source as a possible route to “best value” is useful to balance this extra effort. Bigger projects will require integrators who should be expected to respond to RFP’s. A two step process seemed attractive, separating software selection from integrator selection. In the first step, the agency is free to select open source software without any bidding process, since that step doesn’t require any expenditure. Then the agency finds three bidders for the integration job. I made a note to work on lining up a quorum of qualified integrators for the more complex open source packages.

SHARED PROJECTS
An explicit goal of the conference was organizing shared projects. Andy Stein promoted the GOCC in a description of his effort to build a portal for local government. I suggested that he open up this project in the development stages and he agreed to consider my position. I met a couple of small companies that support software shared by several states or agencies and want to move it into open source projects. I offered to help with set up the open development process and prequalify some contractors to work on it. This should bring some new inventory to GOCC. We saw shared projects for scholarship administration, medical information, mental health care management, and 211.

James McKerr and Scott Kveton of OSU described their experiences with two significant “community source” projects, Sakai and Kuali, that the OSU open source lab participates in. Sakai is a learning management portal for universities, and Kuali is an ERP system for universities. Both are multi-million dollar efforts. They described the community source model, which involves establishing a heavyweight non-profit organization to manage development, with founding members committing substantial sums of money ($50K-$700K range, $2.8M in initial grants to Sakai) to build a replacement for complex commercial systems that would otherwise cost $1M+. I think this model might be too ponderous for many projects, but it seems to work for the universities, especially as a way to attract grants, it has some successful examples, and it allows for ambitious effort.

Government CIO’s are talking about some very ambitious efforts. For example, Bill Crowell, CIO of the Oregon Department of Human Services, wants to create a community version of a SACWIS system. SACWIS (Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System) is the system that states use to manage their child welfare cases. The system implements a set of 96 federally mandated processes, plus processes specific to individual states. A SACWIS deployment costs a minimum of $10M, ranging up to an estimated $800M for an upcoming California deployment. There are 11 states planning new or upgraded SACWIS in the next few years.

It turns out that because each SACWIS system is built with federal sponsorship, the code is public domain. However, it isn’t generally shared. The big integrators have their own codebase from their last job that they can extend for a particular state deployment. Each state gets a system that is built to a custom set of requirements by a big integrator and delivered at a particular point in time. Then, because it’s a custom system, there is no upgrade process and no sharing of enhancements, and the system eventually goes out of date. If there were a shared, living version of SACWIS, with a community participating in a continual upgrade process with contribution of enhancements, it would produce a lot of benefits. Initial adoption would be faster and cheaper. The system would be upgraded over time. There would be far fewer replacement cycles. Hundreds of millions of dollars would be saved.

I sat in a working group that included Crowell, Walter McDonald (who wrote the federal requirements and serves as a requirements consultant for most outstanding SACWIS bids), and a gentleman from GGI-AMS, one of the integrators with a relatively modern version of SACWIS. The vendors are hesitant to open up, but based on this type of participation, it seems clear that something can happen.

A lot of federally funded public domain code would be more useful if wrapped in an open source community process, and that’s definitely an area where I want to do more work. Larry Augustin introduced his company, Medisphere, which took the public domain Vista code for managing hospitals (2 million lines of code, $2B invested over 25 years, used in all the VA hospitals) and modernized it for the small and mid-sized hospital market.

I got a decent reception for the idea of organizing a user collaborative for ODF adoption, with responsibility for building an MS-Office plugin for reading, writing, and previewing ODF, as well as for providing other adoption resources and processes. It seems like this would provide a simple route to open document formats for many users. For example, Jeff Kaplan, who just organized the Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems study, thought some of his participants (open standards supporters from 13 countries) might be interested.