Kennesaw State University had little commitment to open source while I attended. Inferior solutions using proprietary software are rife in Georgia, generally. Yet, if there is a conference, http://goscon.org/ touting:

Does your organization have an open source strategy?
Come hear how government organizations, your peers and industry partners are
changing their approach to information technology with open source.

there must be some significant interaction between the government and open source communities.

Enter Nebula, the cloud computing platform from NASA, http://nebula.nasa.gov/. Nebula is a great chance for open source software to register a big success in an important high profile project. The government can benefit from robust solutions to common problems that can be reused for maximum benefit and efficiency. The open-source communities that NASA will be drawing code and inspiration from generally strive for:

* Efficiency
* Reusability
* Transparency
* Clear documentation

Nebula will eventually provide a modular, efficient, cloud solution for common problems like authentication and security, http://apps.nasa.gov/blog/2009/may/layers-of-trust-authentication-for-the-science-clo/.

Having a single solution for the entire government for such common tasks, tasks that can be implemented once and managed minimally, will boost efficiency and slash redundancy. Using common, open standards with best practices is key. But, don't pretend that success is a foregone conclusion. Proprietary software vendors with their secret binary formats are waiting in the wings to laugh at us dreamers and our open-source solutions. These software vendors would like nothing more than to have each department in the government with it's own bloated contract for "customizations" and "maintenance" and budget for software and hardware that will be nothing more than a redundancy. But enough with bad-mouthing competitors. Let's think about the upside of success!

The federal government spends over 70 billion annually on IT.

The efficiency, agility, responsiveness that can be gained by using new technologies at the scale of the federal government should not be under-estimated. Resources can be allocated more dynamically instead of monolithically like in the past.

The amount of useful data that can be brought together is staggering. Think of the communications that can be facilitated between scientists, public officials and the public, the private sector. Cloud computing could be NASA's next velcro. With the opportunity to develop processes and applications at a huge scale, NASA can supply the American public in general with hardy, innovative cloud solutions that could be used for smaller "business application" level problems.

Interestingly, according to wikipedia, "As velcro only became widely used after NASA's adoption of it, NASA is popularly credited with the invention of velcro." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velcro. So, NASA did not invent velcro? NASA did not invent cloud computing either. NASA's adoption of cloud computing (using Python and Django primarily!) could be a boon to our open source communities.