“Sharepoint is a plague upon the American workforce. This ubiquitous piece of collaboration software has taught millions of people that Intranets are destined to be places where you can’t find anything[, but it] doesn’t have to be this way, despite what Microsoft may have you believe.”
- Joe Flood on Freeing Yourself from the Tyranny of Sharepoint
Today countless teams are using WordPress to drive collaboration and facilitate inter-team communication. This presentation — given at the May WordPress DC Meetup — showcases some of the creative ways companies and organizations are using WordPress as the central hub of their day-to-day workflow: To organize and collaboratively edit documents and other non-web content, track and communicate their team’s progress with one another, and extend WordPress to work with their existing tools and practices
Click on the slides below to begin, then press the left/right keyboard arrows to navigate
Recording of the presentation (starts at the 10:00 mark):
Enterprise Open Source Usage Is Up, But Challenges Remain. 80% of enterprise uses open source; 2/3 contribute code upstream; and 1 in 4 have detrimental open source policy.
Hacks/Hackers — the international grassroots journalism organization dedicated to creating a network of journalists and technologists to rethink the future of news and information — welcomed its 10,000th member today. Just two and half years after our start as a Meetup group in the Bay Area, we’re now in seven countries, across 26 cities, and have regular events on four continents.
People have found jobs, co-founders for startups, acquirers for their company, learned new skills, hacked out projects, shown off their work and so much more at Hacks/Hackers events [...and w]ith 10,000 members, we’re only getting started.
Most often, when we talk about open source in government, it’s talked about in one of two ways: either it’s the pitfalls of the federal IT procurement model that can’t seem to comprehend a world in which open-source is an option, much less potentially a superior choice (“acquisition as a roadblock“), or it’s reiterating the same open-source talking points that haven’t seemed to give open source much parity with the wall of organizational inertia proprietary software seems to have gained over the years (“open source as an alternative“).
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), however, is in a unique position. As the newest kid on the block, it’s one of the few government agencies to have been born in a digital era, and more importantly, without the bureaucratic baggage that all too often stymies innovation. They have a chance to “do it right” from the start… and they’re doing just that.
An Agency Born of the Internet Generation
Yesterday, CFPB announced a bureau-wide preference for open source in its shiny new Source Code Policy, by my crude research, a first for any government agency. There are two watershed shifts here: first, that the agency not only should, but must evaluate open source software on equal footing to its proprietary counterparts, a comparison which I believe will increasingly fall in open source’s favor, and second, that unless there’s an overriding security or similar concern not to, public code must be public. There’s nothing new here. All it says is that we should use the best software for the job (a no-brainier), and that that software, the public’s property, should belong to the public.
So why is this news? Plenty of government entities have released source code, or encouraged the use of open-source software. But no one has come out and plainly stated that they were an “open-source agency”, that open source is the new default, and that absent an affirmative step by some nay-sayer, that the public will have access to their code.That’s huge. It’s flipping the burden, and it’s the way things should be from the start.
Over the past several years WordPress’s market share has enjoyed explosive growth across virtually every industry. Today, it powers nearly a quarter of new sites, and is the CMS of choice for more than two thirds of the top-million sites on the web making it the world’s most popular publishing platform by a long shot. Yet one group of seemingly ideal users has been slow to take the former blogging platform seriously: .Govs.
Drupal powers twice as many federal .Govs as every other CMS combined. That’s more than six Drupal sites for every one WordPress .Gov alone, not to mention the Joomlas, MovableTypes, and SharePoints of the world. The build-it-yourself software powers the White House, the House of Representatives, half a dozen agencies, and countless data-driven microsites like Recovery.gov and the IT Spending Dashboard, and its public sector use is equally if not more impressive abroad.
WordPress’s disproportionately low government adoption is arguably the result of a handful of factors. For one, custom post types, the feature that formally graduated WordPress from a mere blogging platform into a full-fledged content management system, has only been around since June of last year. Yet, even among new sites, 1 the ratio remains somewhat stagnant, if not shrinking, leaving one to believe that the technology has lapped its own already stellar perception.
When you stack the two side by side (or against any other CMS for that matter), WordPress is objectively the prudent choice. On paper, you’d be hard-pressed to make the case for anything else. But, it’s not a technical problem. It’s a human one. It seems that WordPress’s greatest asset – ease of use that has resulted in widespread adoption by a largely non-technical user base – is threatening to become its greatest liability.
Among those empowered to make purchasing decisions, there seems to be a sense that WordPress is what you use on the weekends to post pictures of your lunch while Drupal is what you use for “serious” business, and with good reason. For better or for worse, Drupal has positioned itself as not just a CMS, but rather the enterprise solution — an inseparable fifth layer of the increasingly ubiquitous enterprise LAMPD stack.
Notes:
PHP (and the open-source software it powers) often gets a bad rap in many government and enterprise circles, the brunt of such anecdotal cries as “it’s inherently insecure” or “X proprietary product is much safer.” The truth is, much of this unfortunate stereotype is the result of carefully crafted fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). An established disinformation tactic historically used by big names in software for decades, one of the most notorious instances of FUD being the leaked Microsoft “Halloween Documents” that outlined the software firm’s strategy to paint open-source, for example, as more costly or under-supported.
Wired Magazine recently took a turn for the meta. In addition to publishing their recent story featuring the popular version control site GitHub on Wired.com as they would normally, they also published it on GitHub itself under a creative commons license, allowing readers to fork and contribute to the story as they saw fit. In reflecting after the fact, the Wired team said something that stood out to me:
At Wired offices, you hear the question over and over again as we work on stories like the one you’re reading now: “Are you out of the story? I want to go in.” We have a version control problem. We publish Wired.com on WordPress. It’s a decent publishing tool, but when two people change a story at the same time, one of them doesn’t get her changes onto the final story.
We published our GitHub story on GitHub because it was meta-cool. But we also did it to see if GitHub might actually help us solve our problem.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t. GitHub’s great for a lot of things, source code chief among them, but it’s not for the faint of heart. There’s a great deal of command line, and general geekery involved that raise the barriers to entry just high enough to keep it out of everyday newsrooms and editorial workflows. 1
Notes:
I’ve said in the past, that open-source’s lack of adoption in the enterprise space is due, at least in part, to the lack of “focus-group tested ammunition“. Today, I hope the community can help even the odds with this collaboratively edited list of open-source alternatives to typical government and enterprise software needs
I was thrilled to come across this comprehensive list of open-source options for government last week, part of the UK’s Open Source Procurement Toolkit, but was disappointed to see, in addition to it being published in most government agencies favorite web publishing format (PDF), it hadn’t been updated in more than a year.
With a little find-and-replace magic, I converted the PDF into a stand-alone web page (based on Twitter’s open-source Bootstrap and Jekyll), cleaned up a few typos, and published it to GitHub in hopes that it can be collaboratively edited by the broader open-source community.
Please browse the list, and if you find any additions, corrections, or improvements, fork the page on GitHub and submit a pull request.
Live Site: Open-Source Alternatives to Proprietary Enterprise Software
41 Pub. Cont. L.J. 149
The Public Contract Law Journal, Fall 2011
Like many government computer systems, the U.S. federal information technology (IT) procurement model is slow, outdated, and long overdue for a reboot. 1 As the largest single purchaser of code, 2 in fiscal year (FY) 2010 the Federal Government spent more than $77.1 billion on IT procurement, and that number is projected to grow higher by the close of 2011. 3 This is not a recent trend. Over the past decade, federal IT spending has swelled nearly seventy percent, up from $45.6 billion in 2001, 4 for a total bill of more than $500 billion. 5 This growth is partially a result of the unfortunate fact that as few as nine percent of projects are delivered on budget and on time. 6 The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that roughly forty-eight percent of all IT projects must be rebaselined, 7 and of those rebaselined projects, fifty-one percent must be rebaselined a second time. 8
Compounding the problem, end users fail entirely to use nearly forty-five percent of features procured and rarely use another nineteen percent of those features. 9 Thus, purchasing agencies ultimately utilize only about one-third of all features paid for by American tax dollars. 10 In the end, nearly forty-five percent of federally procured software features ultimately fail to meet the user’s needs. 11 It is therefore no surprise that the Secretary of the Department of Defense (DoD) Robert Gates called federal IT procurement “baroque.” 12 Too often IT procurement requirements are crafted with the input of neither end-users nor product developers. 13 As Office of Management Budget (OMB) Director Peter R. Orszag noted, federal IT projects cost more than they should, take longer than they should, and often fail to meet agency needs. 14 Today’s federal regulations shackle government agencies to outdated project management practices and prevent them from harnessing the true power of IT innovations, which have far outpaced the laws that govern them. 15
To better embrace innovation and respond to changing organizational needs, the Government must embrace a two-pronged approach involving both regulatory reform and top-down support for best-practices education to empower IT-procuring agencies to pursue more agile software development methods. By requiring that detailed specifications be outlined at the onset of the process, government procurement regulations encourage the less flexible, waterfall development techniques, rather than the more modern, agile development approaches used by the private sector today. 16 While most prior attempts to reform federal IT procurement focused solely on statutory changes, 17 this Note proposes more modern project management practices and argues for top-down reform on both a regulatory and a human level.
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Notes:
