Public Sector & Open Source: Natural Allies
Beyond having a shared objective of fostering local autonomy, succesful adoption of open source in public sector organizations requires alignment of cultural, financial and technological factors.
In times of conflict and climate breakdown, Free and Open Source Software offers an alternative to the centralized vulnerabilities posed by hyperscale tech giants. The world needs our contributions to strengthen local autonomy, foster networked agility, and improve systems resilience.
Quaive is a social intranet, collaboration and knowledge management platform that builds on Plone. We ship with an open source license. We are partnering with Imio, to bring Quaive to local governments in Belgium. Imio has pioneered a wildly succesful rollout of open source software into the public sector. To make Quaive part of Imio's product portfolio, we have had to find alignment on cultural, financial and technological factors. Culturally, we needed to build trust and find a project management rhythm. Financially, we had to create a suitable pricing model and business model. Technology wise, we translated our NixOS/Ansible driven deployments, into a Docker/Puppet driven devops pipeline.
What is the point of writing code, when the world is burning? How can we resist the ways in which network technologies are used to centralize money and power?
This talk tries to answer those questions, by presenting a mix of business oriented and technical concepts. It provides a complexity science frame to articulate a role for open source software in addressing societal challenges. It then dives into the specifics of a successful partnership between a public sector organization and a open source software vendor. The case study covers the intersection of open source software, public sector organizations, business model innovation and devops.
