Open source Archives

The White House is releasing the software code for a website it uses to track the performance of big computing projects, as a way to fix program glitches and share the tool with other government bodies, according to the federal chief information officer.

The so-called IT Dashboard monitors the budget, schedule and functionality of systems under development that cost the federal government about $80 billion annually. But critics and federal auditors say ratings on the site do not always accurately represent the current status of projects.

Still, federal CIO Vivek Kundra says the dashboard has helped reduce IT costs by more than $3 billion and he wants "to tap into the collective talents and ingenuity of the American people, to enhance functionality, improve the code and address existing challenges," according to a post on the White House blog. "Software developers will be able to collaborate, identify errors, develop enhancements and recommend improvements to the dashboard, and find new uses for it that we have not even imagined."

CIOs throughout the nation and the world, such as Maarten Hillenaar of the Netherlands, Kyle Schafer in West Virginia and Jason DeHaan in the City of Chicago, are interested in deploying the accountability software in their respective governments, he writes.

The code underpinning the dashboard is freely available, through a format referred to as open source.

In addition, the Obama administration is publishing instructions on how to conduct "TechStat" sessions, which are in-person meetings Kundra typically holds with agency CIOs to decide what to do with systems at risk of failing.

He writes, "The TechStat toolkit provides a comprehensive guide for organizations to establish their own TechStats to improve line-of-sight between project teams and senior executives, increase the precision of ongoing measurement of IT program health, and boost the quality and timing of interventions to keep projects on track."

Insurance companies are preparing for the economic fallout of the tsunami rippling through the Pacific by generating risk models based on ground motion data feeds from the U.S. Geological Survey.

"The second responders are actually the insurance industries" said Simon Thompson, director of commercial solutions at map software firm Esri. He already is fielding phone calls from financial sector clients asking for maps of possible damage to facilities so they can predict the cost of the magnitude 9.0 Japan earthquake that hit early Friday morning.

His team is pulling from government data feeds that track the intensity of the seismic activity to illustrate potentially hit structures along the California coast, hotels in Hawaii and ships in the Pacific. Other data sources Esri is harnessing to help the private sector are USGS shake maps, which are close-to-live maps of ground motion and shaking intensity.

"When you look at the shake maps you look at the type of impact that will have on buildings," Thompson said. For example, one company that insures a Hilton hotel in Hawaii is estimating the cost of possible damage to a private lagoon on the establishment's property.

Another commercial mapmaker, Google, is pinpointing for the general public locations, where the tsunami is headed based on estimates from the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration.

Editor's note: There have been multiple estimates of the earthquake's magnitude. The USGS estimated the earthquake's magnitude at 9.0.

The State Department's Office of eDiplomacy hosted a conference Friday that sought to connect technology innovators with those interested in "diplomacy and development to enable 21st century statecraft." More than 300 people from federal agencies and the private sector attended Tech@State, held at the agency's Harry S. Truman Building in Washington. The focus was on open source software.

A few noteworthy items from the conference:

Chief Technology Officer of the United States Aneesh Chopra said all federal agencies now have Congressional authority to pursue prize-based challenges, such as those for developing new applications. "No general counsel can stand in the way of our movement [on] this philosophy," he said.

The White House is considering imposing some type of consistency standard for .gov websites, said White House New Media Director Macon Phillips. The administration wants to interject a little more rhyme and reason to the sites, Phillips said.

State will continue to consider open source technology where it makes the most sense, said Chief Information Officer Susan Swart. Specifically, the agency will look at internal applications that can be hosted using open-source software, she said.

Next week, the Health and Human Services Department will launch a HealthData.gov community on the U.S.'s open data site data.gov. It will be a one-stop resource for health data innovation, said Chief Technology Officer Todd Park. Part of the site will serve as a virtual apps expo, where Park expects people to find problems with the data the agency puts out, as HHS simply does not have enough manpower to check all of it.

Perhaps the best quote of the day came from Park, who said HHS wants to provide developers with the raw data and let them take the lead in creating the software and tools to use it. The agency wants to be a "data sugar daddy," he said to laughter.

The Homeland Security Department has begun the process of contracting to replace the border security network it scrapped last week, by issuing a request for information on interconnected surveillance towers, department officials said on Wednesday.

The market research is part of the department's new plan to acquire proven, ready-made technology tailored to the terrain of each border region, as opposed to the now-defunct $1 billion Secure Border Initiative network. The SBInet program ran into cost, schedule and performance problems in an unsuccessful attempt to install a one-size-fits-all virtual fence composed of monitoring devices, intelligence databases and communication links.

Depending on budget decisions, a formal request for bids on the project might be issued late this fiscal year, with contracts awarded several months after that, DHS spokesman Matthew Chandler said.

The RFI for so-called integrated fixed towers, which was posted Tuesday on the contracting bulletin board FedBizOpps, asks vendors for comments on market conditions and scientific advances to help shape "an acquisition strategy for technology solutions that detect, track, identify and classify illegal incursions." The technology is intended to provide border agents with a full view of activity between ports of entry to stop drug smuggling, illegal immigration and terrorist-related activities. Comments are due Feb. 8.

"The RFI approach is one tool available to us to involve industry at an early stage in our process," Chandler said.

Department officials will start procuring stand-alone tower parts this fiscal year, Chandler added. He said the decision to move ahead with the non-integrated tower elements was based on the priorities of DHS' Customs and Border Protection bureau.

DHS is looking for tools that will offer automatic, continuous wide-area surveillance that are largely open, or not tied to any one brand's proprietary technology, according to Tuesday's notice. Contracting officers envision a system consisting of several towers, where each one is equipped with a suite of sensors for constant surveillance; supporting power; and communications.

The applications will instantly identify humans, animals, vehicles and other suspicious items, as well as provide agents with video to inspect the scene manually for backpackers or people carrying certain weapons. The video will enable border personnel "to classify the threat in terms of group size, whether they are migrant workers, smugglers, etc, and whether they are armed," the RFI states.

The system will display the precise location, speed and direction of suspicious activity, according to the notice. The technology also will draw from pre-existing data feeds that were launched during the SBInet program. The tower equipment and network connectivity must withstand extreme weather conditions and harsh environments, such as the Arizona deserts and mountains where DHS initially had begun deploying SBInet.

The Energy Department unveiled a redesigned website on Monday with an eye toward the future.

The "roll out is another significant step forward in our effort to become a more transparent, participatory and accessible department," said Cammie Croft, director of new media and citizen engagement, in a blog post. "However, we know we have a lot more work to do."

Croft said Energy wants to turn its site into a "cutting-edge, 21st century interactive information platform." To that effect, Energy has begun moving the site to Drupal, an open source management system.

New features include:

• Vintage DOE, which takes a look at an item from Energy's archives and discusses the department's current work on the issue. The focus is on videos.
• Energy Matters, a live-chat series. Secretary Steven Chu will host the first session later this month.
• Profiles within the department's blog, highlighting the impact of energy programs.

White House officials on Friday sent agency chief information officers and senior procurement executives a memo directing them to weigh open source options when buying technology.

Open source refers to technology based on nonproprietary parts, which allow third-party developers to improve and modify the product without having to pay the technology's maker. Advocates have said a move toward open source in the government could save taxpayer dollars and bolster security.

For example, in planning software purchases, "agencies should analyze alternatives that include proprietary, open source and mixed source technologies," states the policy, co-signed by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, Dan Gordon --- Office of Federal Procurement Policy administrator, and Victoria Espinel, U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator.

The guidance reminds agencies that, according to existing policies, buying decisions should "be free of preconceived preferences based on how the technology is developed, licensed or distributed."

Agency officials "should follow technology neutral principles and practices," which include selecting suitable technology on a case-by-case basis by considering factors such as performance, cost, security, compatibility, ability to share or re-use and availability of quality support, the one-page document states.

The Federal Communications Commission plans to rebuild its website using Drupal, an open source content management platform, Steven VanRoekel, managing director of the agency, said in a blog post on Wednesday.

"This decision is a significant step towards modernizing our own underlying online infrastructure -- a key stage in redesigning and rebuilding FCC.gov," he wrote.

Earlier this month, the agency said it would unveil a redesigned website before the end of the year and was posting data sets for use by developers.

FCC will join other agencies and offices such as the White House and the Commerce Department to rebuild sites using Drupal.

"As an open source content management system, Drupal also enjoys a robust and active community of users, code contributors and evangelists," VanRoekel wrote. "We look forward to engaging with this community to help us innovate and learn, as we build out our own budding community of citizen developers."

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen is a big proponent of open source voting machines, which developers say are more secure and less buggy than the proprietary devices made by various manufacturers and in use nationwide. (Here's a helpful article published in IEEE Spectrum magazine explaining open source vs. closed source voting machines.) Bowen got another chance on Wednesday to plug open source voting when she spoke at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, saying it reduces time and costs.

She said as the Nov. 2 Election Day nears, officials in Los Angeles County will transcribe by hand 30,000 to 40,000 voter registration forms a day. The manual process creates mistakes as officials work to figure out if entries are, for example, people's middle names or surnames.

"Paying people to type data from a form is one of the silliest things we can do in 2010," Bowen complained.

A series of new application programming interfaces - tools that facilitate interaction between datasets and other software programs - will make it easier for developers to play and interact with the content on Data.gov, the online repository of federal information and a cornerstone of the open government initiative.

But those are just the preliminary steps to establishing a self-running ecosystem that will convert raw government data into valuable content and interesting applications, a White House technology expert said last week at a government IT forum.

At a June 15 panel hosted by technology news platform Information Week, Eugene Huang, senior adviser to the chief technology officer at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, announced that API interfaces on Data.gov "will be rolled out over the next three to six months." Details are being finalized, he added.

"We hope this will make it easier for developers to access the raw data behind Data.gov and incorporate it into their applications," Huang said in an interview.

The real question that the Obama administration faces as it attempts to open up the government doesn't revolve around implementing the right tools, he said.

"The question is, how do you build a community of individuals who are not just the data geeks but more importantly, individuals who really want to do interesting things with the data and turn that into applications that can be used by the public, much more so than the apps that have already been done?" he said.

A mysterious formula of alchemy, serendipity and the right amount of will, perhaps?

Clay Johnson, the director of Sunlight Labs, an open source community of thousands that builds applications out of government data, said that his organization, the Sunlight Foundation, never had a "sophisticated plan" for moving forward. Growth was the result of making the right connections at the right time and allowing one thing to lead to another. In his own words, "serendipity."

A sustainable ecosystem of support, once given the first spark, will happen "in a snowball as it gets going," said Todd Park, chief technology officer at the Health and Human Services Department, which is rolling out a public-private effort to build a public data warehouse and portal and was recently approached by five private sector organizations that volunteered to publish their health data in the same format and metadata as HHS' datasets to make the work of developers easier.

The United States on Monday is expected to announce the transfer of control of an online research library to the Iraqi people, according to a federally-funded nonprofit organization that had managed the project. The move represents the culmination of a four-year U.S.-Iraq partnership to reinvigorate scientific study in the Middle Eastern country after decades of myopic focus on weapons systems.

Due to Saddam Hussein's militarization of the scientific community, innovation languished in Iraq, once the home of esteemed and influential scientists, physicians and engineers. Launched in May 2006, the goal of the Iraqi Virtual Science Library was to teach Iraqi citizens how to use the Web for educational purposes, bring them up to speed on scientific advances and reconnect Iraq's knowledge base with the global scientific community.

But security, both physical and cyber, frustrated initial efforts to get the project started, according to officials from the State and Defense departments, American information technology firms and U.S. academic institutions - all of whom helped coordinate the effort.

The nonprofit, congressionally-authorized U.S. Civilian Research & Development Foundation has overseen the project since July 2006, all the while helping to safely shift responsibility to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research and the Ministry of Science and Technology. A secure server based in the United States has powered the website, which registered Iraqi users can log onto from anywhere using a password.

To get technical help in setting up the Iraq-side of the system, Iraqi citizens had to speak softly on the phone and sometimes hang up abruptly if discovered talking in English, so as to avoid being associated with a U.S. government operation. Still, building an online institution was easier than building a brick-and-mortar university at the time. Because of Iraq's diminished engineering capacity and looting, the Iraqis did not have the skills or infrastructure to build a physical library. Nor did they have the IT capabilities necessary to construct a virtual one.

The library began as an open source system -- meaning the underlying code was made available to the Iraqi research community for free -- so that Iraq eventually could customize and manage the website itself.

The library now offers access to thousands of journals from major publishers, including the American Society of Civil Engineering, Association for Computing Machinery, Elsevier Publishing, IEEE Publishing, Project MUSE and Thomson Reuters.