This is our final post from OSCON 2009 highlighting how open source is being used to improve the public sector. If you're interested in our other posts from the convention, take a look here.

OSCON wrapped up today, but we couldn't leave San Jose without sharing some of the exciting open source initiatives in the public sector that we haven't mentioned yet this week.

On Thursday, Clay Johnson of Sunlight Labs, who won a Google O'Reilly Open Source Award earlier in the week, started the day with a keynote about Apps for America, a challenge for open source developers to create innovative apps using Data.gov. Sunlight Labs wants Apps for America to show that open source developers can work just as well as huge government contractors, eventually letting small developers compete with contractors on federal projects.

Clay said that while "government is more open to transparency than it's ever been," the window is closing as politics and elections will soon start to take over the landscape. He challenged open source developers to "step up not just in their projects but in changing their country," and we agree - we hope you'll participate in Apps for America this summer.

Friday featured a talk by Gunnar Hellekson from Red Hat Government about how individuals in government have used open source principles in their work. He described how the Navy worked with IBM and Raytheon to modify the Linux kernel to support their real-time needs, and then contributed these changes back to the community, where they're now being used in other fields. Gunnar also spoke about a soldier in Iraq who was stuck with radios that couldn't reach the distance between watchtowers in a base. To solve the problem, the soldier built WiFi routers inside ammo shells and used open source software to set up a VOIP network betweeen the towers, increasing the range of his communication tools without waiting months to go through military procurement.

Gunnar concluded, "The government is made of people. They're not lazy and they're not stupid, they're just constrained by a broken system." He, along with the other participants in Open Source for America, are working to fix this system by encouraging government and private sector to collaborate using open source software.

Government 2.0 was a major focus of the convention this year, and we can't wait to continue this important conversation over the coming months and at the Gov 2.0 Summit in DC this September.

Posted by Eric Hysen, Public Sector Team

This is the second post from OSCON 2009 highlighting how open source is being used to improve the public sector. Check back this week for more from San Jose, CA.

Wednesday at OSCON was packed with talks on open government, open data, and other uses of open source technologies and principles to better government and the public sector. The day started with a keynote by Tim O'Reilly, where he focused on the growing Government 2.0 movement and how open source can fit in. Tim announced the launch of Open Source for America, a new coalition dedicated to promoting use and support of open source projects by the federal government. Google is a part of the coalition, and we're excited to be a part of its efforts to transform government.


Later in the morning, Neal McBurnett gave a fascinating talk on open source election auditing. He argued that election administrators don't pay nearly enough attention to auditing, which is the process of comparing the reported results of a computerized voting system with hand counts of selected batches. Properly auditing results is hard: selecting batches of results to audit requires advanced statistical techniques and doing hand-counts of ballots is time- and labor-intensive. Because of these challenges and due to the rise of what Neal called an "era of trusting computers too much," audits rarely happen today. To help solve this problem, Neal wrote ElectionAudits, an open source application created using Python and Django to automate much of the audit process for election administrators. The software was used in Boulder, CO in 2008, and he's working with Denver and the Colorado state government to use it to conduct better audits in more places in the 2009 and 2010 elections. Neal needs help from the community to help improve the project and drive adoption, so if you're interested in getting involved, take a look at the project site.

A few hours later, Richard Benham and James Tillman from the Elections by the People Foundation spoke about another part of the election process - the machines we use for casting and counting ballots. They began by outlining why they believe current voting systems are broken. Systems that use optically-scanned paper ballots provide a paper trail but can be challenging for some to fill out, and touch-screen voting systems are easy to use but provide no way to audit their results. Further, there are just three major and a handful of minor companies creating these machines, and they view the internal workings of these systems that are central to our democracy as trade secrets rather than public information. Richard and James set out to create a better system. They created what they call a "hybrid" voting platform: voters select candidates on touch screen computers, which print out a completed paper ballot that is then scanned. This provides accessibility, a paper trail, and security. Their software is written in Java and runs on commercially available computers using Ubuntu Linux. Data in the system is stored using Election Markup Language, an open standard for representing election data. They plan to release their code soon, and are working to get the system certified and in use.

One of the last sessions of the day was a panel on Hacking the Open Government, which featured five innovators in technology and government who are pushing the boundaries of open government. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen spoke about her work in the 90's to put data from the California legislature online, and how the tech community came together to help reduce the cost of a system that opened government data to the entire state. Today, she's continuing that work as Secretary of State to open up state government. Silona Bonewald from the League of Technical Voters spoke about Citability, her new project with a goal of making parts of bills in Congress easy accessible online down to the paragraph level, which would bring a new level of transparency to how bills change in the legislative process. The panel also touched on open government across the globe, with Kevin Marks talking about efforts in the UK, including They Work for You.com, a site which tracks the actions of British Members of Parliament.

These are just a few of the exciting public sector developments happening at OSCON. Check back the rest of this week for more, and if you're working on or know about other open source projects in the public sector, let us know in the comments.

Posted by Eric Hysen, Public Sector Team

We're in San Jose, CA this week for OSCON, O'Reilly's Open Source Convention. Over the next few days, we're going to be bringing you posts highlighting how the open source community is working to improve the public sector. There are some really incredible things taking shape, and we're excited to share them with you this week. To start, though, we want to highlight an open source project the Google Public Sector Team is working on, All for Good, which makes it easy to find and share volunteer opportunities from across the web.

We've written about All for Good on this blog in the past, but today we're focusing on one aspect that makes it such an interesting project - All for Good is entirely open source. While All for Good started as a collaboration between Google and partners including the Craigslist Foundation and the Corporation for National Service, it's not owned exclusively by any one of them. Our source code is publicly available using Google Code, and we've provided documentation on how to get up and running using the code to contribute to the project. That means that anyone, anywhere can browse the issues list, find and fix problems, and improve the site for everyone.


Making All for Good open source has helped it grow far faster than if it were controlled by one organization. As you're reading this, independent developers across the country and world are working alongside Googlers and other members of the team to implement new features including allowing users to post new volunteer opportunities directly to the site, formatting All for Good for mobile browsers, and driving adoption of the FPXML feed format. If you want to get involved, head over to the code site and get started!

We're excited to be a part of the growing open source movement in the public sector, and are looking forward to highlighting what others are doing this week. For a preview, check out the Open Government track at the OSCON site, and stop by the Google booth if you're at the convention.

Posted by Eric Hysen, Public Sector Team