Promoting Open Source Software Government: The Challenges of Motivation and Follow-Through

The Journal of Information Technology & Politics has just published a special issue on open source software. My article "Promoting Open Source Software in Government: The Challenges of Motivation and Follow-Through" appears in this issue, and the publisher has given me permission to put a prepublication draft online.

The main subject of the article is the battle between the Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft's Office standard, OOXML, which might sound like a quaint echo of a by-gone era but is still a critical issue in open government. But during the time my article developed, I saw new trends in government procurement--such as the Apps for Democracy challenge and the data.gov site--and incorporated some of the potential they represent into the piece.

Working with the publisher Taylor & Francis was enriching. The prepublication draft I gave them ranged far and wide among topics, and although these topics pleased the peer reviewers, my style did not. They demanded a much more rigorous accounting of theses and their justification. In response to their critique, I shortened the article a lot and oriented it around the four main criteria for successful adoption of open source by government agencies...