Open Source//Open Society: Why we're excited about being involved

Helping the Government become great at open source and gain all the benefits that come along with that is something we are advocates of here at SilverStripe. It's been exciting to see public sector web developers coming into and joining our open source software community, contributing code to the SilverStripe open source project and changing the way web services are delivered to the public for the better on the New Zealand Government Common Web Platform. When the opportunity came up to be part of the upcoming Open Source//Open Society (OS//OS) conference we jumped at the chance. As a community and company we share many of the same values being explored over the two days of the conference.

SilverStripe are sponsoring the Open Government discussion panel at 11:45am on day two of the conference. It is an ideal platform to raise awareness of open source in government in terms of both open source code and open source as a social process of collaboration and change. In my role as the SilverStripe community manager, I was humbled to be asked to join the panel and I hope to bring some insights into open source communities and government agency participation in open source.

This cross section of open source and government is something that I've been exploring lately and lead me to research and produce a white paper and set of guidance for New Zealand Government agencies working with SilverStripe CMS. In the spirit of open source I've also released all this information under Creative Commons and on GitHub. I'm hoping the panel is a good chance to help share some of these views and welcome more public sector contributors into the SilverStripe ecosystem.

The panel consists of local and international advocates of open source and it's place within government. The proposed topic "the government should open source everything", should give rise to some interesting discussions as it will touch on both the technical and social aspects of the open government movement. Many of the questions for the panel are also being raised in an open dialogue on Loomio (so make sure to lend your voice) and you can see more details of the panel over on the OS//OS website.

OS//OS starts on the 16th April at 9am at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington and offers two days of interesting speakers, workshops and collaborative sessions. The SilverStripe team (look out for the blue shirts!) will be live tweeting during the event and sharing some insights from the conference next week.

Looking forward to two days of good dialogue and collaboration on our communities favourite topic… open source.