Last Thursday, as thunder pealed in the background, I turned the television on to the local NBC affiliate to see what was happening with the weather. As it turned out, our county was under a tornado warning, with high winds and heavy storms.

As the anchors talked, they said that they had checked the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport’s website, www.gocho.com, to check on the flight status of inbound flights and that flights had not been significantly delayed because of the storms (there were no tornadoes, fortunately).

The NBC 29 anchors were not the only ones checking www.gocho.com that night. Since we launched live on April 21, the website had not seen as much traffic as it did on the night of the tornado, and into the early morning hours.

Note the May 8 and May 9 traffic. The tornado warning lasted from about 10 - 11 PM on May 8, and hits to the website carried over into the next day.

The site that enabled the anchors at NBC 29 to see how the weather was affecting flights was an endeavor four months in the making. The old Charlottesville Albemarle Airport Authority website had a Flash introduction and a difficult to navigate website. The Director, Barbara Hutchinson, sought to embark on a strategy that made the Charlottesville airport Central Virginia’s airport of choice, and she wanted a website which contained all of the information that a traveler would want from an airport, with as much information as possible without clutter.

Thus, OpenSource Connections, with Birch Studio Graphics offering design and Flash support, came up with an airport-focused content management system that allowed the GoCHO team to communicate most effectively with their clients. The biggest issue that they sought to overcome was handling phone calls from the public to answer questions that they could also find on a well-designed website. By reducing the volume of phone traffic and channeling those questions to the website, the Airport Authority could focus on operating the airport and improving the experience of travelers.

Working with Ms. Hutchinson and her team, we were able to pinpoint the highest value information that travelers sought and to tailor and deliver a website that provided that information in an easy to find manner. Additionally, by implementing a content management system, we were able to facilitate the Authority’s communication of information to the public. The old site was in static HTML, and was difficult to update information, whereas the new website can be updated on the fly. JetBlast, the new GoCHO blog, is one example of ways in which the Airport Authority can now communicate much more rapidly with the general public, and receive feedback on what they have to say.

We have also tied in FAA flight information and travel cost information from Kayak to a front page tabbed browsing system so that users can find flight deals from the CHO airport, creating a one-stop destination for people who want to find out more about commercial travel at the airport.

The resulting site, we think, serves the public well.  What do you think?  Contact us and let us know!

During FOSE, I was surprised to find that FedBizOpps had completely changed its format, look, feel, and usability.  I found out about this because I had bookmarked several pages to look at responding to potential RFPs, and none of them worked.  So, instantly, I had a predisposition against the new FedBizOpps, even though I consistently complained to colleagues about its lack of functionality.

However, once I got over the initial dissatisfaction of losing ten or so bookmarks to a poor conversion, I started looking into the new website.  Now that I’ve been using it for a couple of days, here are some observations:

• The search agents solve a key missing element.  Instead of having to type in the same searches over and over every day, I can save a search with the criteria that I want and have it scheduled to run on a regular basis, sending me an e-mail with the newest postings.
• Searching by expiration date is a good capability.  I want to see what’s yet to expire, expiring soon, and the like.  However, one element missing in a saved search agent is a dynamic date.  In other words, I can’t say that I want postings which expire tomorrow through eternity and have that date move forward daily.
• This site was not fully tested.  My two biggest pet peeves should have easily been caught in testing: 1) if I open a link (for example, to a posting) in a new tab, it messes up the original tab, and 2) the back button doesn’t seem to work.  I like to return to previous activity by using the back button.  Even “Return to Results” does not work, and there is no obvious internally linked navigation.
• Site visitation does not have permanence.  If I keep a tab open on a posting, it’s probably because I want to come back to it.  If I put my computer to sleep and come back, I can’t navigate from that page anymore.  It’s quite irritating.
• There’s no obvious way for me to provide feedback.  If the government wants to improve and wants to serve its customers, then it should make interaction easier.
• I didn’t see it coming.  If I would have known that this was coming and the effects it would have on my searching efforts, I could have prepared adequately.
• There’s no obvious FAQ or user’s guide.  It’s truly a libertarian site–you figure things out on your own merits, apparently.  No paternalism here!

All in all, as the title implies, I think it’s a step in the right direction.  The transition was poorly not handled, and it’s clear that testing did not incorporate the full cycle of usability testing.  I would be surprised if there was a detailed test plan, and if there was, it wasn’t detailed enough.  However, the concepts of usability are improved; I just hope it’s not another several years before the government decides to take the next step.

FOSE 2008 is over, and we’re all back home. Here are my observations from the final day of FOSE 2008:

• It would have been nice to have our people attending more sessions. Arin Sime got to attend a couple of sessions, and Eric Pugh saw the opening keynote speech, but it would have been nice to attend more sessions to get the government point of view of information technology.
• The attendees have a general distrust of custom solutions. It’s not a wonder. They probably suffer from vendor lock, unresponsive clients, and have generally been burned by bad process.
• There are pockets of Agile development, but not many. This probably leads to the problem cited above, but it also reflects a greater problem…
• Contracting officers don’t know how to price Agile development. The most common pricing scheme for development projects is fixed price. Agile can only deliver a fixed price for labor. Maybe it will be easier under a blanket purchase agreement or with sprint-sized task orders.

It’s too early to say whether this was a worthwhile trade show for us. Each day, we definitely had conversations where people had specific problems that they were trying to solve which our team and process could help them solve. Whether or not we can get from problem identification and solution provider acknowledgment to actually providing the solution remains to be seen.

The people who came by our booth yesterday seemed to represent a slightly different mindset than what we saw in Day 1. I can still categorize the attendees:

• People on a mission: They know what they want, and they’re very specific about what they are looking for. Questions like “Can you do J2EE” and “Are you familiar with Drupal [Alfresco, Joomla, Expression Engine]?” were much more common in day 2 than they were in day 1.
• Browsers who either haven’t heard of open source or misunderstand its meaning: These are fine people to talk to, as there is an opportunity for us to tell them what it is and what it isn’t. Firstly, let me say that open source is not the answer to everything (saying something like that at OSCON would get me lynched. As an aside, I’d wager that the number of people who attend both FOSE and OSCON represents less than 1% of either conference’s attendee population. That number disappoints me greatly, as both populations need to learn about each other over the next few years if our government is to remain competitive without spending greater and greater amounts of a percentage of GDP.
• Schwag runners: The group of people almost sprinting through the exhibit hall sort of reminds me of the Filene’s basement sale. It reinforces why we don’t give out schwag. Perhaps the companies who give out schwag wind up having more conversations with people that they would not have otherwise had, but watching the surreptitious glances of candy grabbers hoping that nobody from the booth actually talks to them makes me think otherwise.

The one group of people whom I expected to see some of that I have yet to see is contracting officers. I know that many agencies are not meeting their set-aside goals, so I would have expected the KOs to be swarming the small business pavilion to find the vendors who can help them meet their goals. We have seen a few primes come by and talk to us and when they discovered that we are a service-disabled veteran-owned small business (SDVOSB), then the timbre of the discussion changed (though we’d rather have people be interested in working with us because of the quality of work that we do) . Maybe, as someone put it, the KOs have been burned too badly by low quality set-aside qualifying firms who can’t actually do the job in the past that they are now looking at the major primes to serve as the vetting mechanism. It’s not a bad idea.

I’m also surprised that nobody is blogging about FOSE. The number of blog posts found on Technorati covering FOSE takes up less than a page. Comparatively, OSCON is usually a top (if not the number one) search term on Technorati during OSCON. There are about 45 news articles on Google covering FOSE, but I would still expect people to be writing (and blogging) more about this convention. It’s huge. There must be at least 4 times as many people here than at OSCON. At OSCON, crowds come in waves as people come out of sessions. At FOSE, there is a constant stream.

Still, being at FOSE is worth it, because it’s important that government users of software become more acquainted and comfortable with open source products and don’t have the not invented here (or by a small group of proprietary software providers) syndrome. There are pockets of users of open source products, and some who are interested in learning more, but the road ahead is a long one. We intend to be there; as citizens, we have a vested interest in how our taxpayer dollars are spent.

We just completed Day 1 at FOSE. While I was not able to attend any of the presentations, I did walk around the exhibit floor and had a ton of conversations with attendees. Here are a few themes that I observed:

• There is still a lot of ignorance about open source. Despite the efforts of AFEI with conferences such as DoD Open, the message is not getting through at all. The comment I heard that most epitomized the ignorance was from a government contracting officer: “First it’s closed, then it’s open, then it’s closed again.”
• Not enough open source is SEM certified. The desire for DISA and other agencies responsible for SCIFs to want to know what’s going behind the cleared wall is understandable. However, open source products will have MORE auditability, not less. It seems like there are not enough advocates with enough experience in and understanding of open source products talking to information security officers about the benefits and overcoming objections. The other unfortunate side note is that it’s awfully hard to get SEM paperwork entered in as a bug into an open source project.
• The hardware vendor market has to be close to saturated. I was surprised at the preponderance of hardware vendors exhibiting at FOSE.
• The number of prepackaged software vendors is surprisingly high. Most software has a short shelf life at best. Why government purchasers are paying for long-term licenses and not insisting on code ownership is unknown to me. I think it relates back to the first point about the ignorance of open source in the government purchasing community. If it took a more open source friendly approach to procurement, I posit that costs would go down and quality would increase due to the benefits of meritocracy that the open source community experiences. It’s not a panacea, but it’s a right step.
• The number of companies at FOSE who do what we do is suprisingly low. Not everything that the government wants comes out of a box. I’m surprised that more companies aren’t there making the pitch that “when what you want software to do doesn’t come prepackaged, talk to us.” Software packages rarely do what you want straight out of the box.

Hopefully the talk that Scott McNealy from Sun gave this morning will resonate with program managers, procurement officers, and developers in the government. Eric Pugh will be blogging about that presentation shortly; the Sun CEO spoke about many of the topics we have been blogging about in recent months.

In the March, 2008 issue of Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson wrote an article positing that the marginal cost of technologies which drive the Internet (and, by inference, software) will approach zero over time. That timeline is shorter than many think. Because the incremental cost of the next bit of hard drive space is too small to dicker with and the number of people over whom that cost is amortized is so large, Yahoo! can offer unlimited e-mail storage and YouTube can offer unlimited file uploading.

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For a March 18, 2008 presentation on doing business in Second Life for the Charlottesville Business Innovation Council, I developed a white paper covering the background, economics, dos and don’ts, and notions to consider when starting a business in Second Life. The white paper is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States license in a PDF version here and in a HTML version here.

For those who do not have the time to read the entire paper, I have copied the executive summary into this post. Appropriate citations are made in the full versions. I also added a citation list at the end of the post.

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On March 18, 2008 at 7:30 AM, Jason Hull will be presenting “Doing Business in Second Life” for the Charlottesville Business Innovation Council. The event has sold out; however, if you wish to attend, please call the CBIC office at (434)817-6300 to get on the standby list.