One of the primary fundamentals of the open source community is sharing knowledge and information. From that principal, organizations, including US government department, have seen more growth, better technology, and you guessed it…better collaboration. At Government Technology, an article was published entitled, “Can open Source Software Enhance Collaboration?” The answer to that question is a resounding, yes! The Open Justice Broker Consortium (OJBC) dedicated for collaborating on justice-related, open source sharing is already implemented in Maine, Hawaii, and Vermont. The consortium came into play like many government security programs in a post-9/11 environment. Hawaii already has an ambitious project based off OJBC software called: Hawaii Integrated Justice Information Sharing. They went the commercial vendor way and found it was not to their liking:
In order to stitch together data from these various entities, state officials initially considered a proprietary software solution, explained Clay Sato, data processing systems manager of the Hawaii Criminal Justice Data Center. But the project’s scope quickly drove the price beyond the budget. A single sign-on system for only 250 users could easily cost $30,000 in software alone, Sato said.
Not only does the consortium save its members money and serve the causes of justice, other government departments to increase collaboration and information sharing are also using it. Open source government projects are on the rise and experts are in high demand, just as a powerful, robust search engine for Big Data, enterprise, and the Cloud is. If you are interested in an open source search application, LucidWorks fills all the above qualifications.
Whitney Grace, April 15, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search