Bureaucrats, Technocrats and Policy Cats: How the Government is turning to Open Source, and Why.

Deborah Bryant is Public Sector Communities Manager at Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSU OSL), where she advocates and creates collaboration between public, private and academic concerns in pursuit of the successful adoption of open source technology and models. She leads OSL’s production of the annual Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON), the preeminent event and platform for collaboration amongst government IT management at all levels of government.

Deborah’s interest in open source and its implication for government is reflected in her civic involvement; she serves as a Board Director for DemocracyLab.org; on the Board of Advisors for the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV.org) ; on the Oregon Statewide Distance Learning Advisory Council. Government transparency is a personal passion. She is also an elected official, serving as Commissioner in a local special services district.

Deborah’s government background started with the Oregon State Legislature during the Year 2000 legislative session and continued at Oregon’s Department of Administrative Services for five years where she served as Manager of Enterprise Strategic Planning and Policy in the Office of the State CIO and also as Deputy State CIO. During the Year 2002 legislative session she represented the State’s Executive Branch position on proposed Open Source legislation and earned a reputation for an open, constructive approach to working with diverse and often conflicting views.

Prior to entering the public sector, Deborah held management positions in several emerging technology areas; parallel and high-speed computing and commercialized internet and web applications in the 80s, commercial wide area networks, advanced telecommunications and data/voice convergence in the 90s.

About OSU OSL: The Open Source Lab is home to growing, high- impact open source communities. Its world-class hosting services power the Linux operating system, Apache Web server, Drupal content management system and over 50 other leading open source software projects now changing the face of computing.

• Web site

Bjorn Freeman-Benson

Board Director, Democracy Lab

Director, Committer Community, Eclipse Foundation

While striving to be a Renaissance Man, Bjorn keeps falling back into the clutches of conformity with engineering stereotypes such as dynamic languages, software engineering, juggling and general aviation. His escape attempts have been through orienteering, bicycling, planting trees and painting his airplane. He is passionate about doing things instead of just talking about them, and he thoroughly enjoys the annual party he helps organize for the Eclipse community.

You can read Bjorn's blog at http://eclipse-projects.blogspot.com/.

• Web site

Greg Lund-Chaix is developer and project manager at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab. Greg’s current project is the Oregon Virtual School District. The OVSD is a joint project with the Oregon Department of Education to provide digital teaching and learning resources to Oregon public school teachers. Greg is also a mentor and organization administrator for the Google Summer of Code, where he managed the OSL’s participation in the mentoring of students learning to participate in the open source community. Prior to joining OSU, Greg spent the previous 12 years as a developer and systems administrator on various distance learning and telecommunications systems for the Oregon Department of Administrative Services.

• Web site

Clay is Director of Sunlight Labs. Prior joining Sunlight, Clay was one of the four founders of Blue State Digital, the progressive left’s premier technology and online strategy firm. This firm, which was born out of the Howard Dean campaign, was also responsible for Barack Obama’s Web presence. At Blue State Digital, Clay was responsible for developing the organization’s brand and building its initial client roster. He also had a hand at building some of the company’s early technical tools. Before joining Blue State, Johnson was the lead programmer for Dean for America in 2004, overseeing the development of grassroots tools like GetLocal, DeanLink and Project Commons. Prior to entering politics, Johnson was a technologist at Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) where he helped to develop the company’s Web syndication product. He also started the first Internet Knowledge Exchange, KnowPost.com, and worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence at a Venture Capital firm, but still claims that he learned the most from his first job—as a waiter at Waffle House in Atlanta, Georgia.

Aleks Totic is a member of the OSDV Core Team. He dove into open source and startups at grad school in ‘93 by writing MacMosaic, and has been part of the open source/startups/investments vortex since. He has been interested in modernization of our election system since 2003, had a polling place in his garage, and wrote an online election system for FairVote. He loves having lots of users of his code, and is looking forward to deploying its TrustTheVote system.

• Web site