It’s not often you hear a business executive say that government is pushing the envelope on technology. I know it’s the first time I’ve said it in my 25 years as an IT executive.

And, I’ll keep saying it as I see government adopt collaboration methodologies, open development, and community sourcing to build software that results in lower cost development and deployments, higher quality code and the transparency that we all expect in our applications today.

The indicators that government is beginning to lead in a collaborative approach to building technology are multiple:

• The appointment of our first federal CIO Vivek Kundra, an amazing professional dedicated to openness and with years of experience that include successes in both the executive suite and the public office.
• The incredible response and support we’ve received from the Open Letter to President Obama tells us that this is an industry movement, not a handful of companies, that will bring open development to the steps of local, state and federal governments around the world. More than 100 individuals have signed the letter to date.
  
• Most recently, the UK’s decision to enact a 10-point action plan to encourage greater use of open source software speaks volumes about the benefits of openness in the public sector.

And with all of this momentum, I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about government mandates. It’s important for software vendors, users and developers to keep things in perspective. One size does not fit all. And, “open” doesn’t have to explicitly translate to mean open source software. There has never been a question in my mind whether IT environments should include only open source software or only proprietary software. A combination is reality, and that reality is achieved through collaboration.

Collaborative methodologies and community sourcing are paving the way for how applications are being developed today and will be developed in the future. I’ll make a short plug here for the CSI-sponsored open source project TriSano, but only because it’s one of the best current examples of collaboration in government. It’s a collaborative effort among government, public health professionals, and software developers that is resulting in a surveillance and outbreak management system built and deployed at a fraction of the cost of alternative solutions. We see the possibility of replicating this process across government departments and divisions.  So, as government continues to push the envelope, there is so much opportunity for collaboration, open development and community sourcing. Let’s not sell ourselves short. If we think in absolutes, such as “all software must be open source or all software must be closed,” we belittle our industry as we represent it to government.