[PLUG] HB 2892 Update

[Eric Harrison]

On 7 Apr 2003, Cooper Stevenson wrote:

>Finally, just so you know, the Oregon Dept. of Administrative services,
>while testifying officially that they are "against" this bill, are
>actually saying that they oppose only some of the language in this bill,
>_not_ the bill itself. 

Computerworld has an article that mentions that Rhode Island and Hawaii
are getting into the act:

http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/story/0,10801,80053,00.html


<snip>
Sharing can be especially helpful if your software needs are different from
those of most organizations, notes Jim Willis, director of eGovernment at
the Rhode Island Department of State.

His office used open-source software to design a repository for the vast
library of content, which ranges from rules and regulations to the minutes
of municipal meetings, that the State Department must keep on hand and make
available to the general public. A colleague from the state of Hawaii heard
about Willis' work and e-mailed to ask his advice about a similar project.
That got Willis thinking that states could help one another by sharing the
open-source software they had modified for special state uses. "We're now
trying to set up [an online] repository of which state agencies are using
open source and for what projects," he says.

Although the details have yet to be ironed out, Willis plans for the states'
open-source repository to be available to everyone, so the rest of the
open-source community can benefit -- and contribute. The plan is for
Rhode Island and Hawaii to jointly create and maintain a Web site that
will archive the documentation of the work each state has done on its
open-source software. The hope is that in the future other states will
also document their work.

"Documenting our practices with the intent to share them with others
has threefold benefits," Willis notes. "We learn from the experience of
other states, we share development resources with other states, and we
have better internal documentation of our own practices. All this for
the effort of articulating our practices and documenting our internally
developed software such that it makes sense to others."
</snip>