“The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings” – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy

Governments across the world are becoming increasingly focused on ‘open government’ and sharing information, thereby improving transparency and accountability. Among the more recent developments in the open government space is the idea that government models that are used to design and evaluate policy are freely available to the public to use, distribute and modify without restriction.

Government Open Source Models (GOSMs) have the potential to play an important role in public debate by engaging the community and other stakeholders in policy analysis. The new generation of information sharing, GOSMs are the future of effective open governments and embody the principles and philosophy of Open Source.

This presentation discusses the issues around ‘how’ GOSMs may be released and puts forward the concept of a ‘models.gov’ platform which may be integrated with government data platforms available today.

The practical implications of how the Open Source Software (OSS) licensing of GOSMs could shift the balance of power in public debate between government and external stakeholders are discussed. Moreover the choice of OSS licensing is also likely to affect vendor lock-in and government software procurement.

With countries such as the U.S, U.K and NZ currently looking at issues around releasing and reusing government developed software, the Open Source community has an opportunity to contribute to discussions on how this might best be achieved and what this would mean for future open source contributions to public policy.

Disclaimer: The views presented belong to Audrey Lobo-Pulo and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government.