On Being Open

Generally I keep my professional life (as a software architect and middle manager at Tektronix and now Xerox, after our division was acquired in 2000) separate from my political life.

But there's an intersection that I think is worth commenting on: transparency in government and open source software. My experience is that both are very valuable for the same reason: more eyes make for better quality!

Just as having more programmers looking at code and making contributions makes for great software (often of much better quality than closed-source commercial software), the more informed citizens we have participating in government decision-making, the better the results will be.

And there's also the issue of trust. The more transparent program code or government processes are, the more we can trust what they're doing.

As a City Commissioner, one of my goals will be to re-invigorate and strengthen our citizen input mechanisms so we can keep those good ideas coming.

And I also hope to find a greater role for open source software in helping run government. There a lot myths about open source (e.g., it's not safe to rely on community-supported software). My belief is that if we knock down these prejudices about open source and create a level playing field where IT professionals can pick the best software available for a task, we'll see a lot more open source software powering our government.