Understanding the Potential for Open Government: Open Source Processes for E-Government

1. 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 http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi/Presentations/CRITO/OpenGovt.ppt

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

3. 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.

4. Open source processes • Free/open source softwaredoes 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.

5. 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

6. 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

7. A closed source business process example

8. Java Community Process

9. 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.

10. Administrative process example

11. 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.

12. 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

13. 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 • HiGov.NET Intranet portal • Prototype (Microsoft format video) • HiGov.NET Intranet Portal: An Open Source Solution for Empowering State Employees With a Dynamic Web Portal

14. OSS Web-DB on Legislative Meetings and Bills

15. RI Online rules and regulations w/email notification services

16. Applications: State Government • HiGov.NET Intranet portal • Prototype (Microsoft format video) • HiGov.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

17. 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

18. DD(X) Overview

19. DD(X) Acquisition Guidelines

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

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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 • #N487650-27803 • No endorsement implied.

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

25. 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.

26. 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.