hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0242.txt

Episode: 242
Title: HPR0242: Open Source in Government Panel Discussion
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0242/hpr0242.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 14:43:47

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visual trombone and all this is gonna be a wonderful Christmas moment!
Thank you!
The following presentation from the Utah Open Source Conference held August 28th through
30th, 2008, is underwritten by the Utah Governor's Office of Economic Development, with a mission
to provide rich business resources for the creation, growth, and recruitment of companies
to Utah, go ed.utah.gov.
Streaming and podcast hosting bandwidth for this and many other presentations at podcast.utos.org
has been provided by Tier 4.
The presentation entitled Open Source and Government was a panel with P-Dashdown and Philanly
moderated by Jason Hall.
I was also told that there was more bio coming about him, but that bio has yet to show up.
So I'll turn the rest over to Jason to do the rest of the introductions.
Thank you.
Actually, the main applause will be given to some of our panel members here.
What we wanted to do is have an opportunity to discuss the concept of Open Source in our government,
from the concept of using the technology, finally, in whether political, military, other government purposes,
but also the concepts that make Open Source important to us.
How can we get those to apply to government itself?
So we can have the transparency that we love in our political process.
Turning that in, we invited two members that are quite respected in our community for various reasons
in the government as well as in Open Source.
So I want to introduce them real quick.
First, we have P-Dashdown.
If you want to stand up.
We're not familiar with P-Dashdown, I don't know where you've been.
The founder of Ex-Mission, the greatest ISP in the state, also an important person.
He's brought a lot of Open Source concepts to the politics in helping to kind of expose some of the stagnant infrastructure
that we all know is our local political process.
By really opening up a wonderful Senate campaign that I know many of us helped around with,
but also is a great opportunity to participate in a campaign in a way that we hadn't been able to before.
So to figure that would be a great way to bring some light to all of us and how what he learned
could be applied to other campaigns in the area.
So our second panelist is Phil Wendley, who is former CTO for the state,
well-known entrepreneur.
It's now a former professor at BYU, or in three days former professor at BYU,
running his startup fanatics, which has been blogging about if you've ever paid attention to the Utah Open Source
planning, it's a great place to get an aggregate of issues on there also,
but we've been able to follow along with blogs to start up this company,
which has been a very interesting insight into that development.
But he has some great views of how the state process works and some of the difficulties he had in getting open source concepts to be accepted by our state.
And notice about some of the roadblocks in there in terms of technology and acceptance.
A lot of these things.
Yes, I know about it.
So I figured a great way to start is open it up to you guys first off,
to say what you might have might see as current events in open source and a government in politics.
So if you want to start maybe with two here.
First I'd like to give a little refresher on my campaign,
because it's been almost two years since election night.
When I started out, I didn't envision an open campaign.
I didn't know what I envisioned.
I was literally thrown out into the water and expected to learn how to swim.
And when you run a campaign on a federal level,
what you get are a lot of consultants from Washington, T.C.,
kind of circling the waters, trying to sell you their services with a cash up front, of course,
to help you figure out what you're supposed to do.
And I backed up, I didn't listen to any of them,
and I kind of built a laundry list of what I wanted on a website,
first thing I wanted was a calendar so people could see what events were coming up and what I should be doing.
The second thing was, you know, setting up a mailing list.
Third thing was setting up credit card processing to make it easy for people to donate money.
And the fourth thing was a wiki, because I'd use a wiki quite extensively at X Mission
and documenting our policy and procedures.
We've since moved our health pages that we give to our customers all online to a wiki.
It was a much easier way for us to run a company documentation system
rather than reprinting the employee manual on a yearly basis,
to have it all online and where we could edit it and make changes
and allow the employees to update policy and procedure as needed.
So I thought a wiki would be a good organizing tool.
And what happened is the wiki kind of became the most important part of the website,
because running through office you walk into it and you kind of feel like,
at least I did, I felt like I had a kind of study area around me around certain policy topics.
Do I really know much about healthcare? Do I really know much about energy policy?
How do I find out more?
And so I thought, well, what I'm going to do is put out my thoughts on these different policies on the wiki
and then allow anyone who wants to come in and criticize or put up their own thoughts
and try and build some policies in an open fashion.
That idea had never been tried before in a political campaign.
There was always this brick wall between the electorate and the candidate and their advisors.
So there was quite a lot of attention that was directed towards my campaign
because of that strategy.
But I've been disappointed that since the close of the campaign nobody else has really picked up on that.
I haven't seen any other campaign trying draft of policy and procedure using wikis or in an open fashion.
There's certainly been the YouTube debates where people can submit questions openly,
but it was still a very filtered process.
Maybe if I have a lot of the election, there have been more invitation.
But I was hoping that it would be an example that could be carried on by other candidates out there.
And I haven't seen anybody this cycle is doing it to that extent.
I think it's strictly a success strategy.
People look at success and want to imitate it.
It's not a matter of candidates saying I want to be as open and possible in my campaign and open and possible in my office.
So I'm going to follow these strategies.
But it is funny though because I heard I think was NPR who collected a group of voters in Ohio.
And they went down and ran down all the issues.
They ran down all the issues like health care and the energy policy is in the war and what was important to them.
And time after time again accountability was number one.
Accountability came back and that's what people wanted from their elected officials.
I think everyone in this room, regardless of your political party, can agree that we want accountability from the people we send back to Washington.
We want accountability from people we send to the state.
Healthy life accountability in our cities.
And I think using wickies and calendaring and open scheduling and open meeting policies on the Internet is a great way to bring us that accountability.
It's just going to be a little slower than I thought.
The other thing is I think a lot of candidates look to the Internet as a real gold mine for hardest thing.
I think a lot of candidates from all over the Internet, from all over the world to that matter.
On a federal basis you can't take donations outside of the United States from non-American citizens.
But you can take them from Americans living abroad.
So the Internet is viewed by a lot of candidates as a real gold mine.
I think if you're a presidential candidate it probably is.
But if you're any other kind of candidate it's still a very hard, hard proposition to raise money on the Internet.
Out of the $200,000 I raised from my Senate campaign about a third of that came off of the Internet.
The rest of the came off face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and functions.
So I think the Internet at this stage is a lot like television was in the early 50s where people knew this was going to be a porch for politics in the future.
But they really hadn't gotten their minds around how to reach everybody through it.
Yeah.
I have a few questions.
Oh, sure.
Do you have a minute?
How do you respond on my podcast?
Yeah, they are mostly probably on average from about 75.
The question was asked about my Internet contribution side.
So the average donation was about 75 dollars.
I probably say the most I got off the Internet was probably a $1,000 donation.
But those were few in part between them.
So one thing I picked up was right at the beginning.
We mentioned that parallel starting your campaign was a lot like jumping into water.
And I got the shark swing around not knowing what to do.
Now I kind of see that immediately in the open source world.
A lot of times we jump into projects the same way.
And that's what causes us to reach for new ways to solve problems.
Do you think there's any more parallels with that in terms of things you could do and how parallels the open source world?
I think it comes back to specialties.
I mean, there are people out there who understand driver creation.
They understand different languages better than other people.
And drawing them in on an open source project is people are going to gravitate towards their specialty.
In trying to come up with the best policies, I think farmers should be the ones being asked on agricultural policy.
And scientists should be the ones being asked on energy policy.
And people who feel like they have an issue no matter what it is, the government is going to affect that in one way or another, unfortunately.
And being given an avenue to speak their mind on that issue, they're going to do that.
Whenever an internet-related bill comes up at the Utah State Legislature, and to some extent the Federal Congress, I try and give my input on it because I know it affects what I do and what my business is.
But I don't know where to start with on a number of topics, but giving those avenues and opening it up and asking for help, the help will come.
There also is the problem of being lost with everyone else asking for help.
I mean, if you start an open source project and it's minor and nobody else is interested in it, or you can't get the word out that people want it to attract contributors, the same thing can happen in government.
And I think with if the state, the state has been very good at putting on the legislative bills and the drafts of bills up on the website, if they did something like adding a commentary section to those bills, you would get an enormous amount of contribution on that.
Now, reading KSL.com and reading Salt Lake Trib.com and some of the commentary that goes on there is a little disheartening because I think the anonymous commentary really comes down pretty hard and doesn't always enlighten the discussion.
So I don't know if it would be a matter of non-anonymous contributions only on the state website, but I think that at least should open it up a little. Maybe Phil can talk a little bit more about that.
I guess the question is, how can you have an active wiki and deal with the management of the anonymous contributions?
When I first started my wiki in the campaign, it rolled on for about four months without any spam and without any vandalism. And then one day after that, I got hit by a number of vandals that were just, it was a non-slot and I was like there till 1 a.m. doing reversions and backing things out and I thought, you know, I can't stay up all night doing this, I got to go to an event in the morning.
So I locked it down and after that point, we didn't have to use a registration system or you'd register and you'd send an email to the staff and ask us to grant you permission.
That was unfortunate that we had to do that because it really did slow down the contributions.
But I look at something like Wikipedia where they have such an army of maintainers that it's hard for the vandals to get through that and think that if the government did put up a central wiki that you would also get another army of maintainers to keep it proper.
Yeah, I have to, I have and I went back to my business after the campaign and there was a lot of work to be done there.
But it's still something that arrives on my mind that I would like to document. So one of the things I said during the campaign was, I'm not only here to run for what I think is very poorly managed office, I'm here to inspire other people to run.
Because if you look at the makeup of our representation in Washington, it's career politicians and a lot of attorneys and very little else.
I think we should have mothers and firemen and service people and a whole spectrum of America representing America, ISP owners.
And, you know, take about it. Who can you look at in the Congress, the Federal Congress that really understands technology?
Well, Senator Stevens, just bunch of tubes.
Yeah, so we need to have better representation in Congress, the American populists and the way we get that is inspiring people to run.
What I got when I ran was this peak behind the Wizards curtain where I realized that this really is not something you need to climb the ladder for, anyone can do it.
And I looked at some of the other campaigns that were out there and we were passing them and leaps and bounds and we didn't know what we were doing.
So I think, yeah, how to is something on the future slate.
I would love to write a larger document about the whole idea of democracy and technology and what, how that will revitalize democracy in my opinion.
Well, you mentioned a couple of the tools that were really important, you know, the Wiki was really important to you and then the concept of maybe future commentary.
But I think the anonymous comments probably spiked something over here with the whole identity.
I know Phil loves talking about identity over there.
Phil, I'll turn the time over a little bit ahead and if you know any other tools in my case.
My favorite, or the thing I think I first when someone mentions open source and government is a meeting that we had in 2001 in preparation for the Olympics.
One of the things that we were quite concerned about and not unduly concerned, I don't think, was that with the increased attention that Utah was going to gather, we would become the victim of more attacks than normal.
And every drug website is a subject of multiple attacks. We wanted to make sure we were prepared.
And so we had a number of meetings. I kind of came into the second, like came CIO and they said, oh, there's all these meetings going on.
You probably need to go to them. So I started going, well, one series of meetings was about inclusion detection.
And what system should this work select for intrusion detection? And they were looking at vendors and I remember we had a meeting where the, an SB3 of 18 and T came and was telling us all about the intrusion detection services that can provide and all of this other stuff.
And so we're in kind of an executive section after all of this. And I looked at the guy who's running the thing and I said, so why don't we just do snort? And he said, can we?
And I said, why not? Yeah, you can. And so they did.
But the assumption was open source was not acceptable. For whatever reason, they knew about snort. They actually kind of wanted to use snort, but they didn't believe that whatever powers that had been or were or were to be would find that acceptable.
Not because it was a free tool. Those looked on as, you know, maybe not good enough because it's clear what. So I think that there's a lesson there when it comes to open source and government is there often the question about open source and government comes down to can we?
And if somebody is actively evangelizing and saying, yeah, it's okay, but probably would be more open source in government. Now, you know, the state is a big place. And there are all kinds of things. There's, you know, thousands of Linux servers. There's also thousands of Windows servers. And, you know, that there's probably even some OSU servers except none of that's somewhere.
You know, there's mainframes and everything else. So, so you're certainly going to find a lot of open source. If you go look at that, you're also going to find a lot of a lot of proprietary code. And sometimes that's because in the way that things are done.
The idea is we want to buy something and put it in and use it. We don't want to do research and think about it and not be pejorative. I just mean that those people aren't there. Right. So just is not a group of programmers in certain areas where they're going to go often and figure this all out and build an architecture.
What they want to do is they want to go buy a system, put it in and use it. You're probably not going to find any state very soon building an open source finance project.
And they're just going to go buy SAP or something and use it because it's there. But there are a lot of opportunities inside government for using open source.
I'm kind of the thing that we've got on about transparency as a form of almost open source and government. I think people in the same understanding almost all of you are from your kind of people from Idaho.
But you ought to be thankful that you live in Utah because we actually have a pretty good website and system in terms of transparency.
As Pete mentioned, when you go to the state website, go to the state website and find all the doors. You can find all the revision. You can find the calendar of events where we're committing. You can find the audio for the meeting after the place. You can find transcripts of the audio. You can see video.
The Senate, at least the majority, blabs, fairly regularly. That is not the case. If you think that this is normal, it's not. Most sites don't have anything like that.
And so we actually are fairly blessed. There are other things as Pete mentioned, you know, it could be more citizen involvement, a way for citizens to be involved. We actually are in a pretty good state in terms of how that transparency takes place.
Unfortunately, we're not in a similar situation with our federal government. Part of that is because it's got a lot more moving parts. But also because there are a lot of people who have just soon not been sent back. And speaking of somebody who has been in a fairly public position in an administration.
On the other side of this transparency really sucks. Not that it's bad or that you think loud democracy doesn't need transparency, but it's really, really hard to do business in a transparent environment.
It makes things slower. It's less efficient. And as humans, all of us hate that. So you'll find people kind of rattling against it, not necessarily because they're evil, or they have malicious intent, but because it really makes their life hard.
And that's especially true in a media environment where every decision that you make comes down to a question of how is this going to be reported tonight at 10 o'clock.
And that is always a major factor. You might say, well, it shouldn't be, believe me, if you wouldn't last for long in office if it wasn't.
Every government official, I know, takes that into account because they think about it's morning in the night. What's the price? Can you say about this? And as you know, the price is not necessarily fair, accurate, or kind.
But they can be ambitious. You know, if they have 4,000 words to write before tonight at 6 o'clock, and they've got to pick up the soccer, just like you, and so they get the job done.
So transparency is really hard. And so I'm not saying, you can't say what I'm saying is, we have to be really good to it. And we have to also work at the notice of people and having just jumping to the worst case scenario that somebody is.
Being non-transparent because they're trying to hide the money that they took from Zion's bank or something or that. Zion's doesn't give rise to my knowledge.
But it's usually because it just makes their life really hard. One thing I would suggest to you is there is a thing called change congress.
Because Google change congress, it is very less expensive on the creative comments. And it's about what things can we do to make congress more transparent, more open, and more accountable, as Pete said, and able to listen to the right kinds of advice.
You know, Larry, who is probably on the opposite side of the political spectrum for me, happened to agree on a lot of things.
And one of those is that, as I said, people are not necessarily evil, crooks, or malicious, but they live in an environment that causes them to behave in ways which is probably not good for democracy.
And that environment is one we as the American people have a lot to grow up. Change congress basically has four ideas that it wants people in congress to pledge to.
The first one, I shouldn't say first because I'm not going to get them in the right order, but one is to fundamentally reform the air mocking system, which allows portions of the budget to be spent on specific things that are conventional.
A congressperson decided it should be spent on. Now, there's some give and take there because it's a complex issue, but nevertheless, the air mocking system causes bad decisions to be made.
More transparency is kind of a catch off, but that's one of the principles. You know, we can also see what kind of build or put forth. We can obviously help people vote it on.
We can't necessarily hear all of the conversations that the folks about them or what other information went into the bail, who influenced the bail, who wrote the bail, all of those kinds of information is generally not available because particularly at the federal level.
Another part of the change congress pledge is to finally have publicly financed the election. Now, you may not agree with that. You may have thought about this issue before you decided you don't think that's a good idea because of free speech issues or whatever.
I would encourage you to read about it because I used to feel that there was a free speech issue involved here, and I since changed my mind and decided that the free speech issue is overwritten that I need to create a government where good decisions can be made.
So I encourage you to look at that. I've forgotten one and I probably won't remember what the microphone in front of me. So if I look at change congress, see what you think.
Now, at the other end of the spectrum, one thing I would encourage you to do because we're talking about open source and government. One of the biggest problems with an international open source and government is just people don't necessarily know how or whether they're allowed to do it.
The place where you can have the most influence is your local government. Cities are almost begging for help.
You can almost always get an employment with your city manager or the head of the planning commission. Even in Salt Lake, Salt Lake doesn't have a city manager, but the same kinds of people.
These people will meet with you. I don't think just because you're a group that works in the data center of that on 64 staff or something that they won't talk to you.
They will. And they want to know what you think because if you're in the city, they want to know what you think about technology, how could they include the website, how could they make things more transparent?
Are you willing to help? Are you willing to do something? Cities will welcome the environment. And I believe that local change is probably the first and best change we can make in government because it's so easy to get in. They listen.
The downside is they don't necessarily have all the resources they need, but that you can make a difference in cities.
I'm not really because the organization that was going to be doing it was the central IT shop. It's a time now there's only one, but at that time, and they had about 250 people highly qualified network people, people who understood
security, there wasn't enough. That's what I'm looking for. Grab it to say yes in that group that I didn't have any concerns that they'd be able to figure that out, run it, make it work. They have fully staffed, so that wasn't an issue. But yeah, but it's been, you know, the two guys at the Department of Agriculture, you know, not that they're not bright, but there's only two of them and they got a bunch of stuff to do. So they probably wouldn't have been able to do that. That is an issue.
I mean, that's just like one small application. I mean, what if you're talking about like many of the private level applications, like in my case, my product, my company's product is entirely my business office. That's one of the selling point is that, you know, like the softest and the own product, you can maintain it.
I think we have to talk my head about my deal to tell something.
Talk about getting example for the microphone, about getting examples of open source projects. What's an example?
So Linux, my sequel, PhD, yeah.
So for the mic's benefit, what Bob said is that people in government, and I think this is true in large general, but I feel often want a truck joke.
And so, you know, getting them to understand the concept of community and how that can work and how it can get you past the I want to vendor issue, it is important.
One of the things that I think this question actually brings up is also the idea of training. If you want to bring open source in the government, what you're probably not just going to wholesale, replace everything with open source in a week, you have to start off.
You actually have to have a program, how are we going to do this, you have to think, how are we going to train people, because you probably want people who are trained in, you know, these kinds of technologies before you still put something that might be mission critical.
You can start with non mission critical tools, what people kind of get up to speed and understand. But I do believe it's possible. Now, to stay level, it's a little bit easier because the scope has so many resources.
I don't know what the current number is, but when I was CIO, there were about 900 IT people in this day, you know, with 22,000 employees. You know, yet 900 IT people probably can get things done, there's probably a couple of them that have done the PhD before, there's kind of enough people that you can get something and make a work.
Like I said, if you're talking about individual departments, if you get into a local city, you know, I was in the city of London, they don't have an IT department, like they've got, you know, the outsource everything to some company somewhere and so it's a little harder.
So it's an application that kind of knits together some legacy employing HR pay low apps and
you know, what's it mean? The difference CIO.
And that's a slight to better issue. It's not points out this education goes both ways. You need to educate people about that this is not going to be the end of the world.
Like open source is not going to destroy our systems or get hacked or whatever other fears they happen to have.
The one thing that this discussion is kind of reminded me of that I wanted to make sure I brought up, but you know, several years ago, we called this happening in the news, the CIO, the state of New York, I'm sorry, the CIO, the state of Massachusetts,
state of New Texas rolled up to come when I say CIO, but so the Massachusetts actually tried to use or require open standards for the way documents were stored.
So there's an important openness issue there in terms of transparency. There's an important archiving issue, all of those kinds of things. And if you remember, Microsoft brought out the long nights. He didn't last very long.
He basically got to the point where his life was out and he said this in the work at any time. But there is an important issue there which as a community, we can help foster.
And that is we can help push for open standards in government because it's the right things for government to do. And people like the CIO of Massachusetts need as much support as they can get.
I've been on the wrong side of Microsoft and it can be really, really dangerous.
Microsoft is basically a legal department with some programmers attached to it. And that's where I'm off.
So on that note of Microsoft and local community that I'm involved in my children's school and my mother and my mother and my mother and my mother not come from my brain.
So many of us are high points in 2007 because we're using a new one now.
And I know there's a fun for Kayla. We have to exercise so much for buying new office license.
We got a plate and now we're keeping it for her instead and keep her or whatever. That's like in my life.
Well, that's a great point because there are a lot of opportunities.
It doesn't make a difference for most people.
Yeah, particularly when what you're doing is thinking kids to write and I think they could use open office just as well.
What I don't know and here's something which maybe you guys do, but I talked this for a long time.
But I have no hard data that would actually save them money.
And we can say, oh, let's save money. You don't have to buy licenses.
But where's the data? Where's the report that tells me that?
The other part of Bob's got a report. Bob's always got a report.
The other thing which I would say is that in Utah, where we have such large school districts,
it can be really hard to influence the IT policies.
Smaller school districts.
Why not go all the way to zero?
It's an interesting question.
I think it's one that people in this room could actually start working with their local school districts that's the question.
And it's probably going to have better luck if you attend the South Samford School District and the Alpine School District.
It's because there's a lot less bureaucratic and racial history.
I was part of a technology committee that selected grant proposals from school districts to give out state money for technology projects.
And I was on it. There were some principles from various schools on it, and those kinds of people.
And we did better with renewing things, and we said, okay, these five get the money.
So when you got a proposal from South Samford School District, it generally like the assistant superintendent wrote it,
and he wrote something like, we want this money so that we can buy this stuff to give students this training in these specific skills.
It's very strict forward. We want to give students training to develop specific skills.
When you got something from the Alpine School District or the Grand School District, they actually have professional proposal writers.
There are people on staff that need nothing but write proposals all the day. That's what they do.
And it was always very floppy. Full of education speak about how it's going to raise the steam and the clouds will bloom.
Everything was, there was nothing specific in it at all.
And so the reason I tell you that is, when you start battling with white school district, you likely to run up against the state park,
and you're going to push, and it's going to give, and then you're going to let go, and it's going to start back, and you're not going to get much stuff.
It's a good question. And I would love to see school district spend less money on technology, because it would be nice if we had a computer for every student,
rather than a computer for every one out of every five students or whatever we've got.
But we need day that we need to work with the school district. We need an example.
How often do you think that financial questions are taken by the school district?
Never. But I mean, that's probably a little unfair, because there certainly are a lot of projects that happen that probably wouldn't happen
because there was no budget unless they used open source. But when somebody's not something done in this budget to do it,
the question of what's cheaper, probably, isn't always a flat. Now open source can come in with a proposal on a bid that might.
But usually, by that time, open source has already been discounted, and we're going after a vendor-supplied solution.
And you'd be surprised at how much money the state spends managing licenses.
Not on the licenses, but when you've got 18,000 office licenses and 18,000 or 20,000 windows licenses, and you keep going,
and now you've got to be able to prove that you've got all of those licenses.
It actually takes a lot of people's time to manage all of that stuff. The different definitions says overhead involved that.
Yeah, but 10% of the cost to be the employee portal.
Yeah, so that's my point. I mean, I think there are projects that just wouldn't happen because there isn't market.
But somebody came up with the idea of the employee portal and said it's going to cost $1.3 million, and it gets in the budget as a line item,
and $1.3 million gets approved for it. Nobody's then going to say, well, V, how can we do it for 120?
At that point, that decision's already been made. It's gone.
I'm not saying it's no better than that. It's no better than that.
I mean, that might be part of it. You need to be able to do that.
Yeah, so open office and state government in school, I think it's a good idea for a moral family.
For a moral standpoint, forget the money. Just because it's open, and now we can archive it more easily.
People can get at it without having to own Microsoft, etc.
I can't quite hear you.
I can't quite hear you.
Yeah, that's true. There's definitely a conflict factor.
Now, people who are accounting and have time to accept that, because they have someone who did them a pushback on that,
but for most people, they can do this fine with open office. But there is a conflict factor.
My dad just recently upgraded his computer, and he was having problems with the latest version of Word opening some older documents at this.
So instead of installing Word and telling him that, you know, I just, I didn't tell him.
I just installed open office and said, okay, now it opens your documents and he was happy with that.
So I think a lot of that perception doesn't even need to be informed.
You know, I'll confess that the problem I have with open office is the documents that come in that I lose formatting on still.
And I have to email him back to send me a PDF. I had that just happen today.
So it's still not quite there, but I think for the majority of people's use, it does a great job.
Let me add something about what Phil said about Change Congress. The fourth one that Phil forgot was, you can only take donations from individuals.
And those individuals can't be lobbyists. But another side effect is that you can't take money from packs.
And if you look at any incumbent congressman, you'll see about 90% of their current campaign funds come from packs.
So when a somebody decides to run for office on a federal level, they think, oh boy, I've got to take money from packs because, look how much their money, how much money they're getting.
They're getting on the horse that's already winning. They're not going to give money to the challenger.
And so I was debating whether I should take money from packs or to start. And it's an easy pledge to sign on to you next time because I got about $10,000 in pack money.
And some of that pack money, I wish I hadn't taken because I was thinking, boy, if I don't take it, I'm not going to be able to pay salaries and things like that.
But in the end, I could have done without it.
Well, there's one area that I would disagree on still within that. That's easy for elect officials to adopt.
And a really streamlined thing for me and my campaign. And that's the issue of calendaring.
I set up a Google calendar. My entire staff can read it. I can read it from anywhere. And the public can read it.
And I think that if you see a congressman, a congressperson having a meeting with Exxon Noble, and then three days later writing some legislation that has to deal with Exxon Noble and what they do, there's a little bit of a connection that goes on there.
And I have Chris Cannon while he was, well, I guess he's still in office, but he's tried to take a very advanced approach to some of these trends and issues.
And I kept asking him that this is the one thing your office can do that will set you ahead of all the rest and we still would not accept it.
Now, some of them may say security concerns. I don't want people to know my schedule because some crack did come out with the gun.
Well, public should be telling the retroactively. Tell us what you did yesterday. Tell us who you met with yesterday, but from my point of view, it really made things a lot easier.
And if there's so many good, you know, it's not like Google now, but, you know, we use indirect calendaring in our office. There's so many good calendaring products out there now that connect your phone and do everything else.
It really does make your life easier and publishing them is just one extra step.
Well, the registration cleared up the vandals, but again, it's really cut down on the participation.
What I noticed about people that would come in and spew some rhetoric is that myself or other people participating on the wiki would ask them to justify their rhetoric and we wouldn't get any response.
But with Wikipedia or any wiki, I would argue, the cream floats to the top. The good ideas stand out and they are taken and expanded upon while the bad ideas just sink to the bottom.
So you can have 10,000 people lobbying for the same idea, but if they all come in and they're repeatedly posting the same idea, it's pretty obvious.
But you can have one person with a really good idea that overrides all the majority and their idea rises to the top.
I took that on a couple of issues and went out on the trail with them and those weren't ideas that came from me or my staff or anybody that was advising me, they came from Americans.
I agree with the 100% on the voting machines issue.
I was really disappointed about the voting machine debate went in Utah because I think there were some very capable people both from the University of Utah and advocates of open source software saying, look, we can do this and show the rest of the nation how it should be done and they were shut out in my opinion.
I think it should be open. I think it should be on paper. I might think it should be optical scan and mark the box.
The thing that we do in America is we try to make things way more complex than it really is. The story I've heard about Canada is they have national elections.
They decentralize their counting so everything doesn't come into the county and it's actually counted at the precinct and they're able to count with check marks on paper, everything in four hours.
I think we try to make things a little too complex and maybe we don't even need technology at all in our voting system.
On the other hand, mandating open source, I haven't taken it from the government perspective like Phil has, but I have a friend who went through the Department of Defense worked at the Pentagon for about 10 years and I worked with NATO.
He's as Republican as you can get. We have a lot of interesting conversations over email, but the one thing he continually repeats to me is when you get in, please do something about windows on my desktop.
Because you cannot stand it and it's really degrading in a lot of ways in a lot of governmental departments. I look at some of the government around the world, Munich to get example Brazil's another who are starting to adopt Linux to run their governments on and they seem to be doing an okay job.
So I think there's something we can model up there, but the Microsoft pressure I can imagine is immense and how we fight back against that is just getting people into my opinion are afraid of Microsoft.
We'll get Phil's response to that then.
So kind of two different questions, one mandating open source and the second one is mandating open source elections or what's up with elections.
On mandating open source in general, my personal philosophy would run more libertarian in that regard, but as soon as you mandate something like that, what you've just done is given it an excuse to not perform.
I don't think there's any reason why open source can't win on its own marriage without being mandated that it has enough good about it that government can make the right decision about it, particularly if we all get involved and help.
There's a lot of examples of that happening. Now I gave you the Microsoft story, there's also some question on the other side, but I think it can win on its marriage, we don't have to mandate it.
As for elections, I think that philosophically I would be very close to feet when it comes to where we ought to be with elections in terms of the technology we use.
I have been involved enough in it, not when I was CIO but since, to understand that there are actually a lot of moving parts there, and I really feel sympathy for people like Gary Herbert, the Lieutenant Governor, and others who kind of stepped into this problem.
The current administration in Utah came into office halfway through this decision. After a federal mandate that said you will have these kinds of voting machines, basically there were two choices, obstacle standards, or the DRE, the direct recording equipment, basically a computer with a flash plug-in.
I think that it's very hard for people who are not technical at all who have been used to running elections and understand the security concerns of an election.
Many people aren't stupid. They've been running elections for years, they understand how to run elections, they understand that the old system wasn't supposed to be made mistakes.
What they don't get and what's very hard for them to understand, even after lots of discussion, is that when you put a computer in the mix it becomes a different security concern.
It's not that they're stupid, it's that they know that the old system wasn't perfect. They had lots of errors too, it's just that nobody knew about them.
What they don't understand is that now we've introduced a way for systematic errors to happen, not just very visible malicious errors or other things.
Most of the solutions that have been put in place, even the things like paper sale audits, are actually pre-infected.
If you have an election which involves as many votes as are tasked in a typical congressional district, you can do audits on a reasonable number of machines and catch even intended malicious.
But when you get down to the level of a state house suit, you have to audit about 70% of the actual ballots in order to know with a statistical certainty that there was no problem with the election.
So audits don't solve the problem.
So I think we do have a real integrity problem with our election.
Now, on the other side, talk to your grandma about when she went and used the DRA equipment, I bet she loved it.
It's so much nicer than pushing the stylus through the thing. People understand it better.
So one of the things that's happened is we probably have fewer voter errors now than we did before.
So we have made a trade-off.
We have introduced security concerns, which all of us in this room understand and almost know elected officials understand.
And what they see is fewer voter errors, people are happy. That's the message that they're getting back.
You know, there's been some problems with the die vote equipment in Ohio.
I know that that isn't being ignored, but it is a very complicated issue.
Now, as for the question of open source, as far as I know, there is an open source voting system project that came out of Australia.
I don't know anywhere that it's been tested in the large. Maybe you guys know.
Here's what it's got. I know there's a lot of experiments that have been tested in the new old part of this.
They have a team.
If you'd like to go not to go for a deal for a deal, you can step out for a deal for a deal.
So the question is about other projects.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
So the question is about other projects.
Like I said, the only one I know about the one in Australia, I don't know where that's gone.
I don't know that it's ever been used in a large scale election.
So that's kind of the status.
Now, let me kind of finish the election, at least my comments on the election with this.
The key problem with using BRE equipment for elections is if it undermines the confidence in the election.
At this point, the only people who don't have any confidence in it are people like that.
Your mom has more confidence in the election because for them it seems better.
So it actually has probably increased confidence in the election system for most people.
At some point, there could be a disaster now will change.
An absolute danger is that there is a potential disaster looming, which could undermine confidence in the voting system.
But we've got a few more questions.
So the final thing, just before we do go and just kind of leave it for questions until we actually start filtering out,
because some of us do need to get to the other classes.
I think that the big thing we really want to take from here is please get involved no matter what your party affiliation or what level of government you care about.
Like I said, really focus on your local government.
That's what's going to affect you the most.
That's what matters. Please get in there.
Talk about open source technology.
Offer what you can do to help.
Use the community because all the different looks like we're here at ETSC.
Try and do is represent the community that's available, whether it's a log, a special interest group.
All of us want to help.
Let's get involved. Let's do what we can to help with the technology as well as the accountability, the introspection into politics.
So I hope we can all take that.
So further questions and we'll just pass this along.
Anyone?
Yes.
You both mentioned transparency and the use of open source government, that kind of thing.
I work for a STEM contractor.
We run into places where regulations require us to have a commercial next to grow.
This only goes wrong.
Are there, and then it's difficult.
Have you run into regulatory restrictions on using open source?
And also regulatory restrictions go on.
Using things and open transparency.
Like there was a movement to go back.
A little while back to that, the federal legislation is clear.
People were considering that.
That's it all over.
And we let our public people clear.
Are there regulatory restrictions that you can see?
If you have, do you know where you're going to find it?
Is it just somebody wanting somebody to sign up for it?
Is there something in the board?
I'm not familiar with any state.
Do you know of any state?
No.
From federal government.
That's what I was going to say is that often the states get money from the federal government for various things.
And the federal money often has a lot of strings of action.
So.
Yeah.
I think the question is, how do we get to open source?
How do we get there?
The question is, how do we get to open source voting systems kind of thing?
And I think I don't know exactly the mechanism to do this.
But the key central price where voting system technology is.
The standards you created, the systems are evaluated.
The federal evaluate, et cetera, is a group inside NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
And I think that if enough people could influence interested Congress people, et cetera, to give that group involved in open source alternative, that would be what would probably be required.
Even if you came up with your own open source project, even if that open source project were wildly successful and you built the best voting system ever.
And a place like you have really wanted to use it.
I believe that it would still have to be certified by the NIST group before they could, according to the hover legislation.
So that's one kind of place to look for influence.
Yeah, I wanted to mention something about the regulation issue.
I heard about that Twitter thing as well for some reason they won't let our Congress people Twitter.
And I thought, man, what a golden opportunity for somebody to be simply disobedient.
I would love to see somebody say, this is dumb and I'm in a Twitter anyway, and then get punished for it.
I personally didn't see anything like that. I don't know what the final outcome was, but I can imagine there are rules regarding disclosure in the Congress.
I know they have, there are, in the state and the federal, they have closed session where they're not allowed, they don't allow the press in and they don't allow any sort of minutes to be taken.
I don't see how that benefits anybody. I can see how individual privacy should be protected in national security.
It should be protected, but when they're not talking about those, what is it that they're trying to keep secret?
I don't know, so I argue that there's very little reason why they shouldn't be completely open.
Even though it may be a headache, you know, if you've got somebody working on your yard, you want to know what they're doing and those people are employees too.
There's a lot of game playing going on.
Before we all take off, there are survey forms sitting on the filing cabinet. On the left, please feel free to fill one out and tell Jason what a good job he did.
Thanks very much for coming. Also, once again, this room was sponsored by Mosey. Go visit them at their booth and thank them. Thanks very much.
Thank you for listening to After Public Radio.
HPR is sponsored by Carol.net, so head on over to see ARO.NAC for all of those meetings.
Thank you very much.