Gotze.eu

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  • Lobbyists need love, too

    Robin “Roblimo” Miller felt bad for Ken Brown of the Alexis De Toqueville Institution (AdTI) last week. So did I. But I think Mr Brown must get used to such situations …

  • Voluntary Industry Standards

    While in Washington, I met Bob Haycock, the program manager of the Federal Enterprise Architecture, FEAPMO. His work is important, and is inspirational.

    Today, OMB published the E-Gov Enterprise Architecture Guidance (Common Reference Model, download pdf), which describes a Federal-wide E-Gov target conceptual architecture, about which is said:

    “The architecture is based on the business requirements derived from the initiatives as well as system engineering design best practices. It provides a workable description of the components needed by E-Gov Initiatives and business activities to move rapidly into the web service-enabled business transaction environment.”

    This is a must-read.

    OMB has also just published a CBA (Component-Based Architecture) White Paper, which outlines a set of recommendations encompassing the selection of tools, technologies and standards that should be considered when implementing new systems and/or components to support the 24 Presidential priority E-Gov initiatives. This document is more or less what UK would call an e-GIF.

    Quote:
    “Success can be based on the extent to which the CBA will support the efficient and
    effective development, acquisition, use, and operation and maintenance of IT to support
    business operations. For that, the FEA-PMO has recommended a set of technologies that
    support both industry-proven standards and emerging technologies    . Together, these
    technologies provide a forward-thinking set of capabilities targeted at completing the 24
    Presidential Priority E-Gov initiatives, while providing a foundation for growth,
    interoperability, integration and expansion. The list is intended as a starter set based on
    their relevancy to E-Gov. It was intended that this serve as a point to begin considering
    relevant standards and to serve as a place wherein appropriate and obvious voluntary
    industry standards can at least be included in an architectural context.”

    It will be interesting to follow how the guidelines and the CBA will be implemented.

    It will also be interesting to see how the preference for open standards will be handled.

  • Smith’s visible hand

    Washington Post has a good story today.

    The post reports that US Congress Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., has used tricky methods to create official correspondence saying the free software philosophy is “problematic and threaten(s) to undermine innovation and security”.

    Mr Smith is from Microsoft’s home state and is known as a strong supporter of them (they pay his campaigns).

    The not-so-hidden hand of Mr Smith in opening yet another attack on GPL and free software is hilarious in itself, but in fact deeply tragic.

    I hate FUDs. I hate lobbying, at least when it’s done it such unethical ways, but also as a principle. I guess that’s why I’ve become a civil servant; then I don’t have to lobby. In government, we call it serving-up the minister 😉

    On lobbying, Tony Stanco was quoted in the Post for saying: The weight of people who are really in the know go against this kind of stance. Well put, Tony!

    Tony will come to Copenhagen on Wednesday morning. Bruce Perens will arrive here on Tuesday. They will both talk at our national conference on open source. We have sold out tickets to the conference, BTW. I hadn’t thought we’d get 300 people, but we have. (if you really want to join us, drop me a note, and I’ll see what I can do).

  • OASIS eGov

    David Fletcher points to the new OASIS e-Government TC, founded by John Borras of the e-Envoy in London.

    I think our agency wants to join, but I am not sure whom we’ll send.

  • Choices, sources

    (I’d hoped to be blogging along while in Washington, but never got around to it; next time, Tony, we need a conference place with wifi!)


    IDGs (and Infoworlds) top news story today: Open source debate heats up at conference. The conference they talk about (but for some reason don’t name) is the eGovOS conference in Washington, which ran this week.


    The conference has confirmed to me that I’m all for open source. Especially for the developing world, but also for the so-called developed world. Open source is a cornerstone in the globalisation process, basically. Bruno Lanvin of Infodev closed the conference by concluding that open source is about giving the developing world a fighting chance.


    The key is to create a level playing field, not only for the various software vendors on our markets, but also at a metalevel, between ideas and concepts, emering and consolidated technologies, and big and small players.


    Bruce Perens’ talk was excellent and right to the point:


    Bob, if you’re going to call for choice and fairness, it should
    be a sincere call, not a sham. Don’t put on a program that calls
    interoperability a too-expensive option. Don’t claim that keeping
    software patents out of standards and interfaces hurts the little guy
    when it does just the opposite.


    Bob is of course Bob Kramer, the executive director and vice president of public policy for CompTIA, Initiative for Software Choice which I wrote about earlier.


    Although the Perens-Kramer-et al panel was an absolute hit, there were generally good and interesting contributions, from literally all over the world. Here a but a few intersting cases:



     

  • OS and FEA

    In a few hours, I’ll be on a plane to Washington, where I’ll spend the next week, hopefully staying clear of the sniper :-<


    The Open Source: A Case for e-Government conference is going to be great. It’s going to be huge too, Tony Stanco of the Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute (CSPRI) of The George Washington University just told me. Tony has been working on preparing the conference for months now, and has done a tremendous job. I’m quite proud that it was I who talked Tony into this whole venture, when we met in Spring in Washington. I’m also very proud to be co-organiser via GOL-IN and grateful to the sponsors for supporting this; it is now official that IBM, Redhat and Devis are sponsors.


    On Thursday morning, just after keynote speaker Congressman Rick Boucher (D- Virginia), I’ll be moderator of the panel titled “Open Source Issues in Europe“, which will include at least:



    And maybe a surprise guest. Either way, it’s a real power-panel we got here, and I look forward to the debates.


    Technology allowing me, I intend to blog the conference. Anyone else doing so?


    Thanks to the good people at the Danish Embassy, I not only have the conference to look forward, but also have a great programme for Tuesday, where I’m having three great meetings: I’m meeting Mark Forman, Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget for E-government and Information technology, OMB; George Brundage, Chief Enterprise Architect, Treasury Office of Information Technology Policy and Strategy; and Robert Haycock, Acting Manager, Federal Enterprise Architecture – Program Management Office, OMB.

  • Open Source is a case for government, Danish report argues

    Today, the Danish Board of Technology published a report called Open Source Software in eGovernment which made headlines in national media, for example (the links are all in Danish):



    The report, made by an expert working group, claims that the government could save a huge amount of money if we move public IT-systems to open source, but also points out that there are many pittfalls and uncertainties.


    Our minister of science, technology and innovation, Helge Sander, yesterday announced that we will start an open consultation process about software policy and open source software in particular. His press release said: (my translation)


    “The [Danish] Government has increased the speed of digitising the public sector. It is important for us to have open and thorough deliberations about the use of Open Source Software in government. Our aim is to ensure free competition in delivering effecient and cheap software products to the administration. We need to assess cost price; quality; implementation costs; user training; and continuous development costs.”


    So, we have been busy in the office today, preparing and opening a new thematic website for online deliberations about software policy and open source. It is open now. I’ll create an English forum too, if anyone wants to discuss with us. Let me know.

  • Ants and cities

    How interesting. Phil Windley and I’ve been reading the same book: “Emergence: The Connected Loves of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software” by Steven Johnson. As Phil says, it’s about “how acting on a local scale, on local information produces useful, global patterns”. 


    According to Johnson, emergence is what happens when an interconnected system of of relatively simple elements self-organises to form more interlligent, more adaptive higher-level behaviour. Ant hills are one example: no one directs the actions of the ants, they have simple rules for responding to local stimuli and yet, produce highly complex and efficient behavior (such as creating graveyards for dead ants or finding and harvesting food sources in a rather systematic manner), yet, “there are no Five-Year Plans in the any kingdom”.


    Johnson’s book is a fascinating tour de force – drawing on a variety of domains, from evolutionary theory, urban studies, neuroscience, cybernetics, to comptuer games and literature. Johnson’s book is almost as good a read as Richard Sennett’s The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities from 1990 (my favorite all-time book, which my PhD was heavily influenced by).


    Phil chose this quote from Johnson’s book:


    There are manifest purposes to a city—reasons for being that its citizens are usually aware of: they come for the protection of the walled city, or the open trade of the marketplace.  But cities have a latent purpose as well: to function as information storage and retrieval devices.  Cities were creating user-friendly interfaces thousands of years before anyone ever dreamed of digital computers.  Cities bring minds together and put them into coherent slots.  Cobblers gather near other cobblers, and button makers near other button makers.  Ideas and goods flow readily within these clusters, leading to productive cross-pollination, ensuring that good ideas don’t die out in rural isolation.  The power unleashed by this data storage is evident in the earliest large-scale human settlements located on the Sumerian coast and in the Indus Valley, which date back to 3500 B.C.  By some accounts, grain cultivation, the plow, the potter’s wheel, the sailboat, the draw loom, copper metallurgy, abstract mathematics, exact astronomical observations, the calendar—all of these inventions appeared within centuries of the original urban populations.  Its possible, even likely, that more isolated groups or individuals had stumbled upon some of those technologies at an earlier date, but they didn’t become part of the collective intelligence of civilization until there were cities to store and transmit them.


    There are many other good thoughts in the book, so go order it!


    In the deliberations about our national IT architecture (see yesterday‘s post), I have set up “eGovernment as urban planning” as one theme for discussion. One of the proposals we make in our green paper about eGov architecture is that we ought to see government at large as a city, i.e., what Johnson and others would call a superorganism, that is in need of some “architecting” and “urban planning”.


    What are the essential patterns of an architecture fit for eGovernment? Thoughts? Please join our deliberations about architecture!

  • Architecting eGovernment?

    OIO.dk:On 30 September 2002 a National Green Paper on IT Architecure was published by the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency on behalf of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. A consultation process now runs until November 22, and an online discussion forum has been established. Based on these, a White Paper on IT Architecture is to be presented in early 2003.

    The Green Paper is in Danish only. On popular demand, we may choose to translate it to English, but for now we want to invite our international collegues for open deliberations about architecture policies around the world. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel.


    For these deliberations, we have created a web forum with a number of themes:



    • What is the domain? What are we talking about? FEA or e-GIF?
    • What is a good architecture policy?
    • eGovernment as urban planning
    • Where are the best practices?
    • What is a service-oriented architecture?
    • Which standards are we talking about?
    • …

    Join the deliberations! Anyone interested in the themes are welcome to participate. Registration is required (free).

  • Moving home

    I’ve decided to move www.gotzespace.dk to the server I use at FutureQuest. This means there may be some outage on the domain name, but slashdemocracy.org/gotzespace should work.


    Do also note that my john@gotzespace.dk is dead. I hope it’ll come up again soon. In the meantime, use john@slashdemocracy.org if you want to get in touch.