Red, White And Blue -- And OpenRed, White And Blue -- And Open

The group's name: Open Source for America. The group's mission: revolutionize the way we govern ourselves, from IT departments on outwards. Or at least just the IT departments.

OSA's newly minted, as of this week at OSCON, and their mission can be summed up in two sentences:

The list of founders, advisors and board members is a who's-who of open source achievements. Industry leaders figure in prominently: Red Hat, Oracle and Sun, Debian, Black Duck, SugarCRM, Novell, Mozilla. So do strategic groups: the Open Source Initiative, the Linux Foundation, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. So do individuals: Monty Widenius, Andy Updegrove, Eben Moglen, Tim O'Reilly. (The gadfly in me wonders if Microsoft was not invited, even despite their recent spate of contributions, or was asked and declined to join...)

It isn't as if the government doesn't already use open source. The real long-term mission here isn't merely to posit open source as a viable alternative to proprietary software. From what I see, the long-term job is to encourage our government to make itself over, however incrementally, in the open source model.

One of the sentences in their charter is "Raise awareness and create understanding among federal government leaders in the executive and legislative branches about the values and implications of open source software". Those two italicized words are the giveaway for me: open source participation means you also embrace transparency of decision-making and design.

We could sure use some more of that. Not just in Congress and the Senate (where the results are broadcast live on C-SPAN), but in the budget rooms, accounting offices and buildings that house un-elected creators of policy -- all the places where most of the crucial but invisible decision-making takes place.

For decades we've been struggling with the idea that our government is not really ours, that the real bums cannot be thrown out because you didn't vote for them in the first place. I'd wager it all started becoming most heartbreakingly clear in the Nixon years, and that cat has been out of the bag (and pawing through the trash) ever since. A lot of whatever reform has be achieved has been the province of whatever administration has been in power at the time. Once they leave, there's nothing to guarantee those changes can be retained.

So why not change things from the inside on a level that can't easily be dismissed -- on the tech level, on the process level? If the changes there speak for themselves and yield inarguable results, they ought to stick.

The total changes might end up being relatively modest, and the OSA do seem aware of this. Their own initial press release puts it this way: "Open source software may not be a cure-all, but it could save billions of dollars, help foster innovation and empower our government to work smarter." Anyone here who doesn't want that?

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