After a slow start, an effort to get governments to share software code got its first five contributions this month. Part of the Government Open Code Collaborative, the repository, fed voluntarily by a group of government agencies and academia working in the model of the open-source community, Wednesday welcomed its latest software posting: RSSonate. Developers with the Rhode Island secretary of state's office designed RSSonate as a SQL-to-RSS, or really simple syndication, tool that will let government push information from databases to public Web sites in real time. RSSonate also includes a Web-based interface that lets users query government databases and receive an XML view of the query.
RSSonate will let public-sector Web sites aggregate content from a variety of sources onto a consolidated user portal similar to MyYahoo, Jim Willis, director of E-government for Rhode Island's office of the secretary of state, said Wednesday at a LinuxWorld press conference. RSSonate will allow the city of Providence, for example, to pull all of its municipal meeting notices data from one of the secretary of state's databases and create a dynamic data feed to the city's Web site. Rhode Island donated its work on RSSonate to the collaborative in an effort to help other states save time and money.
The goal of the collaborative is to avoid having each state spend money on software to do the same things as the other 49 states. "Every year, there's the potential for 50 states to be writing a check for the same software," Willis said. "A lot of states write big checks for very specific software."
Although the commonwealth of Massachusetts introduced the Government Open Code Collaborative nearly a year ago and formally launched the project in June, all five applications in the repository have been contributed since Feb. 11. In addition to RSSonate, Rhode Island has contributed an open-meetings database that contains electronic meeting notices for all state and local government entities, as well as a tool for the AppleScript Mac OS scripting interface. Massachusetts has contributed Virtual Law Office, a package of apps for state and municipal legal departments, and an administrator's guide to Big Brother, an application that monitors system and network-delivered services for availability.
To join the collaborative, state or city governments must sign an operating agreement certifying that any code they contribute to the repository is free of intellectual-property infringements. The collaborative's Web site lists 17 members, including the Kansas secretary of state and state treasurer's offices, Massachusetts' IT division, Massachusetts cities Gloucester and Worcester, the Missouri secretary of state's office, the Rhode Island secretary of state's office, the School of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Albany County (N.Y.) Airport Authority, and the city of Newport News, Va. Government agencies can also sign up as "observers," meaning they can use code contributed to the repository but aren't permitted to themselves contribute code.
The collaborative's repository has moved past the proof-of-concept phase and is letting agencies actually share code, Willis said. "This will allow people like me to create an online development environment, as opposed to working in disparate silos."
Autor: Larry Greenemeier
Quelle: Information Week, 16.02.2005
