Last year, NASA, the U.S. State Department and the Veteran Affairs Innovation Initiative held an open source summit to advance the use of open source software in government. They are announcing that registration is now open for the second annual summit! The purpose of the summit is to get leaders form the public and private sectors as well as software developers to discuss development, release, and use of open source software.

At this years conference there will be many topics being discussed including the current and future state of the government open source community, how-to insights for open source projects in government, real-world projects and their successes and challenges, and government procurement of open source software.

As the role of open source in government expands and matures, the relationship between technology, policy and culture will be increasingly important.

Open source brings numerous benefits to government projects that involve software. Included in this is increased software quality, reduced development costs, faster development cycles and reduced barriers to public-private collaboration through new opportunities to commercialize technology.

The hope is that this inherently transparent, participatory, and collaborative approach will revolutionize the way software is created, improved and used. If this policy can be adopted then it has the possibility to reduce costs in government by billions over the long haul.