[Osia-members] GovHack (and Open Government) could be more impactful if they learned from Open Source communities

[Jack Burton]

On Sat, 2017-08-19 at 07:45 +1000, Cameron Shorter wrote: 
> Hi guys,
> 
> I attended the recent GovHack event and have written an article about it 
> which has been published. I've suggested that  GovHack and Open 
> Government could be more impactful (rather than just busy) if they drew 
> some lessons from Open Source:
> 
> http://www.themandarin.com.au/82472-making-govhack-open-government-more-impactful/

Thanks Cameron for pointing that out to everyone. You raise some very
good points in the article.

Your first four recommendations in particular should make a substantial
difference to GovHack itself (#1 to quantity of participants, the next
three to quality of outcomes), if implemented.

I'm in two minds about your R5 -- personally I see benefit, rather than
detriment, in diversity of APIs (including protocols & standards for
data access), as healthy competition tends to foster innovation (and
whilst the goal is clearly to encourage innovation in the use of open
data, why not foster innovation in how it's published too?) ... but I
agree with you 100% on the importance of having clear documentation for
them.

Whilst more general in scope, your R6 & R7 are well worth pursuing too.

It's interesting to note the overlap in part between your R7 (in
relation to open government specifically) and some of the comments that
Carl & I made in our submission to PM&C in January (in relation to
software in government generally -- see sections 2.1, 4.1 & 5.2 and
recs 2, 9 & 11).

Clearly it's high time to replace the ageing (and rather toothless)
AGOSSP -- and I don't see any reason why its replacement could not
speak to community based initiatives like GovHack, along the lines you
suggest, in addition to embodying some of the procurement policy &
process reforms that Carl & I suggested.

Always good to see AU FOSS industry players making sensible
recommendations on improving government's approach to FOSS, open
standards & open data -- keep up the good work!

Regards,


-- 
Jack Burton FACS CP <jack at saosce.com.au>
--
Director, Saosce Pty Ltd (OSIA Member #50)
Company Secretary, Safecoms Cyber Security Pty Ltd
--