Understanding the Potential for Open Government Open Source

Understanding the Potential for Open Government: Open Source Processes for E -Government Walt Scacchi Institute for Software Research and CRITO Consortium University of California, Irvine Wscacchi@uci. edu http: //www. ics. uci. edu/~wscacchi/Presentations/CRITO/Open. Govt. ppt

Open Government? • Free/open source software development encourages sharing, examination, reuse, modification, and redistribution • E-Government encourages adoption of ECommerce/E-Business in government agency operations, functions, business lines • Open government embraces open source and E -government processes, practices, and communities 2

Why Open Government? • Help make government faster, better, cheaper • Empower interested government employees, contractors, and interested citizens to offer help and capture their contributions • Enable creation of public test-beds where existing/new government processes can be demonstrated, manipulated, and refined. 3

Open source processes • Free/open source software does not embody the processes for how to develop, deploy, use or sustain them – Deploying free/open source software is low-cost, but often inefficient and sub-optimal • Closed source software development, deployment, use, and support is also inefficient and sub-optimal – Explicit open source processes could also help closed source systems. 4

Motivations for open source processes • Closed source processes: opaque or tacit, difficult to improve, subject to patent • Continuous process improvement and organizational learning requires open access to the “source code” of operational processes 5

Closed vs. administrative vs. open source processes • Closed: Amazon “one-click” e-purchase – Patented processes inhibits their sharing, reuse, study, modification, and redistribution • Administrative: Java community process – asserts property rights, responsibilities, and administrative authority – legalistic or bureaucratic “policy and procedures” are narrative, not operational => ambiguous interpretation and legal wrangling 6

A closed source business process example 7

Java Community Process 8

Government operations and business processes • Example: Procurement and acquisition • Procurement: purchasing MRO supplies • Acquisition: contracting for services – Not simply a matter using electronic forms or extensible markup notations about them – Reengineering these processes is complex and requires process comprehension, transformation, integration, commitment, and training • W. Scacchi, Redesigning Contracted Service Procurement for Internet -based Electronic Commerce: A Case Study, Journal of Information Technology and Management, 2(3), 313 -334, 2001. 9

Administrative process example 10

Open source process example • Example of an open source process model of a proposal submission process, specified in a Process Markup Language, PML • J. Noll and W. Scacchi, Specifying Process-Oriented Hypertext for Organizational Computing, Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 4(1): 39 -61, 2001. 11

Government operations and business processes • Federal Enterprise Architecture process domains are the prime candidates – – – Financial management Human relations Monitoring benefits and public health Data and statistics development Criminal investigation Regulation and legislation development, deployment, and enforcement 12

Applications: State Government • (Secretary of) State of Rhode Island – www. state. ri. us • Civic participation and public monitoring • On-line rules and regulations • State of Hawaii – Hi. Gov. NET Intranet portal • Prototype (Microsoft format video) • Hi. Gov. NET Intranet Portal: An Open Source Solution for Empowering State Employees With a Dynamic Web Portal 13

OSS Web-DB on Legislative Meetings and Bills 14

RI Online rules and regulations w/email notification services 15

Applications: State Government • Hi. Gov. NET Intranet portal – Prototype (Microsoft format video) – Hi. Gov. NET Intranet Portal: An Open Source Solution for Empowering State Employees With a Dynamic Web Portal (report) – Built using PLONE (www. plone. org) • Governor’s Office, State of Texas 16

Applications: military and security • Most of the military enterprise focuses on operational, logistical, and training processes • Administrative processes are ponderous, procrustean, rather than agile, flexible • Current legacy processes are compliance oriented, rather than improvement oriented 17

DD(X) Overview 18

DD(X) Acquisition Guidelines 19

Applications: military and security • Homeland security will increasingly become focus of process improvement, streamlining and cost reduction. 20

Open Govt Opportunities • Establish OG Web portals and clearinghouse – Create/share process toolkits, libraries, repositories • Co-sourced development of OG processes – amortize and share OG development costs • Capture and codification of government process domain expertise • Operational OG system and process demo’s – OG prototypes and public test-beds – Exportable processes for democratic government operations 21

Conclusions • Free/open source software systems for government represent a significant opportunity • Seek high-level, user-friendly processes for government operations expressed as open source, computationally enactable processes • Open government embraces and extends open source, while also moving towards flexible, agile democratic government operations • Current NSF Digital Govt program does not embrace or encourage OSS applications or processes 22

Acknowledgements • The research described in this report is supported by contracts/grants from: • National Science Foundation – #IIS-0083075, #ITR-0205679, #ITR-0205724 and Industry/University Research Cooperative for the CRITO Consortium • Defense Acquisition University – #N 487650 -27803 • No endorsement implied. 23

References • Center for Open Source and Government – www. egovos. org • Robert W. Hahn (ed. ), Government Policy toward Open Source Software. AEIBrookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, Dec 2002. 24

References • J. Noll and W. Scacchi, Specifying Process-Oriented Hypertext for Organizational Computing, Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 4(1): 39 -61, 2001 • W. Scacchi, Redesigning Contracted Service Procurement for Internet-based Electronic Commerce: A Case Study, Journal of Information Technology and Management, 2(3), 313 -334, 2001. • W. Scacchi, Open Acquisition: Combining Open Source Software Development with System Acquisition, technical report, July 2002. • W. Scacchi, Open EC/B: A Case Study in Electronic Commerce and Open Source Software Development, technical report, July 2002. 25

References • W. Scacchi, Understanding the Social, Technological, and Policy Implications of Open Source Software Development position paper presented at the NSF Workshop on Open Source Software, January 2002 (revised August 2002). • W. Scacchi, Understanding the Requirements for Developing Open Source Software Systems, IEE Proceedings--Software, 149(1), 24 -39, February 2002. 26