Sunlight Foundation

Tools for Transparency: Open Atrium

Today, our guest post is written by Joshua Gay, a programmer, activist, and community organizer whose interests revolve around technology, government, education, and computer user freedom.

My personal interest in the Open Atrium project came about this past fall when I began volunteering to help with the Public Equals Online Wiki. The so-called "PEO" Wiki has a lot of potential for being a good place to coordinate and collaborate on state and national transparency initiatives and projects. However, the software it is built-upon, MediaWiki, needs to be highly customised in order to make it a compelling platform for a community to start using. In my efforts to customize and improve the wiki, I have been using the features and design of Open Atrium as a sort of roadmap for improving the wiki in hopes that I can make it a more useful, powerful, and compelling tool for the transparency community.

The Open Atrium project describes itself as a "part intranet, part do-it-yourself project with a kick of open source hotness," and it certainly is one of the hottest Drupal-based projects out there. Its feature list is impressive, and for many organisations or web-based communities, I could imagine it becoming the primary tool for both project management and development. Here is a quick snapshot of it's six biggest features:

Case Tracker - Open Atrium is designed around the principle of users and groups. Every group on the system can create an unlimited number of projects within the Case Tracker, and within each project you can create to-do items. Each item can be organized and prioritized according to categories or milestones, assigned to group members, and discussions and progress notifications on to-do items can be made through a nested commenting system.

Calendar - Although not feature rich as Google calendar, Open Atrium's calendar does present events in a similar, colorful fashion, supports single or multiday features, and syncs with calendars that support iCal.

Blog - This blog contains all of the basic features you would expect with nested commenting, file attachments, and granular notification system. But, what I think makes this blogging system unique is that it is integrated into the system, and therefore, blog posts can be used as a way to discuss projects and share ideas with other members of your group and community as well as with the outside world.

Shoutbox - This Twitter-like update system is a great way to share quick updates with your group members. What I like best about the Shoutbox is that it integrates a social element into the rest of the workflow.

Documents - This is a simple, but nice collaborative document editor that supports: attachments, a revision system with a nice way to compare different versions, and a nice built print function that allows you to export and share the final product.

Dashboard - The Dashboard is where the entire system comes together and gives you a snapshot of all the activity happening across your groups. It is designed around "widgets" (like iGoogle), where users can add, remove, or arrange the widgets on the dashboard however they like. And, of course, it includes a Twitter-feed widget.

One exciting aspect about the design of Open Atrium is that its developers have designed it around the principle of features being designed like "plug-ins." Hopefully, as adoption grows, we will also a growing list of optional features that you can add to your own custom instance of Open Atrium.

I believe that Open Atrium is a powerful tool for transparency, not only for its potential use by government agencies (which would be amazing -- imagine a legislative feature!), but also an important tool for the transparency movement.

Tools for Transparency: 12 Resources You Might Have Missed

Since I started the Tools for Transparency post back in July, I've written about quite a few social media resources we could all use to help move open government and transparency forward. I've decided to round-up those 12 posts, starting with my first from July 15th, in case you may have missed them.

As I continue writing about Tools for Transparency, what areas would you like to see me touch upon?

The U.K. Goes Open Source

Here is some big news (a couple days late)! United Kingdom Cabinet Office Minister (for digital engagement) and Member of Parliament Tom Watson, in a statement released a day or so ago, said the British government will accelerate the use of open source software in its public services. The government will now place open source software on a level playing field with proprietary software such as Windows, and they’ll adopt open source software "when it delivers best value for money." This is timely as the the Obama Administration begins to figure out how to use technology to reboot our government.

Whenever possible, the government has decided to avoid proprietary software for public services. The government will require its agencies to adopt open source software when "there is no significant overall cost difference between open and non-open source products" because of its "inherent flexibility." In a report on the announcement, the BBC quotes open source advocates as saying the shift from proprietary standards could save the government up to £600 million a year.

Watson said that the government had been experimenting with open source for the past five years, and that they’ve found that it can be best for taxpayers by providing better public services. Watson adds that they need to increase the pace of the open source approach:
1. We want to ensure that we continue to use the best possible solutions for public services at the best value for money; and that we pay a fair price for what we have to buy. 2. We want to share and re-use what the taxpayer has already purchased across the public sector – not just to avoid paying twice, but to reduce risks and to drive common, joined up solutions to the common needs of government. 3. We want to encourage innovation and innovators - inside Government by encouraging open source thinking, and outside Government by helping to develop a vibrant market. 4. We want to give leadership to the IT industry and to the wider economy to benefit from the information we generate and the software we develop in Government.
The BBC report quotes an open source support vendor as saying that the U.K. government's action plan “had ‘more teeth’ than policies being adopted in other countries because the plan was tied into policies regarding how IT managers procure new software.” Charles Arthur, writing at the guardian.co.uk’s Technology Blog, makes a somewhat cynical yet likely apt observation. “Not that this means that all those Windows boxen are going to be ending up on a scrapheap any time tomorrow, though you can bet Microsoft's salespeople to UK government will be on their phones right now talking to key people.”

Doc Searls Interviews Sunlight's Greg Elin

Doc Searls, author and Senior Editor of the blog Linux Journal, interviews Sunlight's Greg Elin in an article about open source in politics and government. Here are the choice parts from Greg describing Sunlight's work, the data that backs it up, and the future of it all:

Almost all of our projects and funded projects are open source -- though sometimes our code is a bit hacked so it takes a while to release it. Nearly every group I know is completely invested in open source: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache... The frameworks are being rapidly adopted: Rails, Django, Symfony...

The work I'm most interested in these days is dynamic-scripting -- what I think about as "flow-and-go" data sets instead of what Jeff Jonas coined as "rack-and-stack" data sets. Dynamic scripting is Unix pipes! That is, every application does input and output. We leave the world of databases-make-reports and enter the world of RSS-flows-in and RSS-flows-out.

Two examples of flow. A Sunlight database, LouisDB.com, scrapes the Congressional Daily Record daily, transforming it into XML. Garrett Schure (Sunlight Labs developer) and Josh Ruihley did a word count algorithm on the Congressional Record to come up with Congress' "Word of the Day" and the microsite http://capitolwords.org — which goes back to 2001 and has an RSS feed, API, and a widget people can put on their site. Louisdb.com makes it easier to search the Congressional Record — and now there's a script boiling it down into tweetable content that others can use, too. Second example, from MySociety: TheyWorkForYou. It provides profiles of what Members are doing in Parliament by parsing the Parliament's daily record and votes. Lastly, many sites rely on the work of Josh Tauber's http://govtrack.us b/c. Josh scrapes all sorts of data on bills in Congress and transforms it into XML. Josh's data is open and so also is his code. It's a tremendous contribution. ... Programmers and technologists who grew up with the web and with open source have been entering the political and e-government arena the past several years bringing with them the tools and practices of open source and Web 2.0. They are collaborating with -- and sometimes competing with -- existing technologists who were often activists who learned spreadsheets and databases and desktop publishing and then the web to communicate their message. So we are seeing a geek-i-fication of everything from campaigns to good government groups to government itself. More open source. More frameworks. More collaborative communication among individual developers. It's uneven, it's bumpy, but it is definitely happening. The tipping point has occurred now in politics and government -- the question remains only where the tree is going to land.

Open Source South Africa

Last fall, the government of South Africa announced that it was adopting Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Open Document format (ODF) as official standards for government communications.  South Africa's moves are adding further momentum to the global trend among governments and other institutions to adopt open standards. South Africa joined such countries as Brazil, China, Spain, India and Malaysia, as well as municipal and regional governments in other countries (Massachusetts and New York here in the states), in using open source as a way to encourage efficiency and effectiveness of governance, to cut IT costs, foster the development and competitiveness of their national software industries, and as means to compete worldwide.

Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, writing at his commonspace blog, links to audio of a talk given by Aslam Raffee, chairperson of the South African government's OSS working group. Raffee was speaking at last week's Open Everything Cape Town event where he gave an update on the transformation and discussed the challenges that they have encountered. "We've done very well in terms of setting policy, but very poorly at implementation," he said. "We've got to fix that." Surman summarized by saying the government is on track to have all departments have ODF capability by the end of the year; Microsoft is integrating ODF into Word; and the government's document management is likely to be open source.

I guess it's not surprising that some challenges remain, however, including the need to convince certain government entities to embrace openness. There is a certain amount of reticence remaining among the bureaucracy. And apparently South Africa lacks skilled open source developers. Hmmmm. Sounds like an opportunity.