Open eGov

In democracies, the most interesting politics are the kind you can describe with sports metaphors. That's even true when the big story is about technology. That's what we see in Molly Ivins' line, "the Internet is to politics what television was in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race".

Yet democracy isn't just about elections. It's also about governance. And that's where Linux and Open Source have quietly been making huge changes, just over the last year or so. Here's a list of just four related inititiatives that that are radically changing the rules and methods of technology procurement and implementation in government:

• OpenSSL <http://oss-institute.org/fips-faq.html>, a "collaborative effort to develop a robust, commercial-grade, full-featured, and Open Source toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) protocols as well as a full-strength general purpose cryptography library."
• Open Source Software Institute <http://oss-institute.org/>, which is on a mission "to promote the development and implementation of open-source software solutions within U.S. Federal and State government agencies and academic entities".
• Project Leopard <http://leopard.sourceforge.net/>, an "eGovernment web services platform based on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python)". Project founder (and Linux Journal contributor) Tom Adelstein says Leopard is a huge time- and hassle-saver. "All you have to do is write to this module installer that we have. So you can basically do the Web pages and database schema and you're done."
• Open Government Interoperability Project <http://ogip.org/>, which produced Project Leopard and is working on the Open Government Interoperability Standard (OGIS), "an initiative to develop an open specification for ensuring that Governments and administrative software applications work together more effectively".

"These efforts are still new," says Tom, "but already there is a rewarding sense that their implementation is inevitable. The cost is so low, and the rewards so high,

- Doc Searls