TonyBibbs^2.0

Before any of what I am about to say can make any sense first know that the motivation for all this comes in light of a decision I've recently made to continue on in government a bit longer. Secondly, before I can begin to answer the question posed in the title of the blog entry let's first define what I mean by community. Here are a few definitions I dug up:

Group of people sharing a common understanding who reveal themselves by using the same language, manners, tradition and law.Wictionary.org

A specific group of people, often living in a defined geographic area, who share a common culture, values, and norms and who are arranged in a social structure according to relationships the community has developed over a period of timecdc.gov.

So if I had to craft my own definition of a community it'd be more of a list of requirements:

1. A group of people who share a common culture
2. A group of people who willing participate in building relationships in the community
3. An unselfish group collaborating to achieve a common set of goals

You don't have to search too hard for great examples of communities. Examples I can name are Iowa Outdoors, a community I founded that is dedicated to hunting and fishing in Iowa. There is also the PHP community...for those not in the know PHP is a popular programming language for building websites (including this blog). In fact, open source software such as PHP are some of the best online communities (Apache, Ubuntu, etc).

Notably missing from that list is anything catering to government technology workers. Google doesn't seem to reveal anything. Probing IRC for related channels gave the same. If there were a segment of people who could benefit most from our community it is government. So why doesn't one exist? I think major reason is cultural.

Government culture is very much top-down which stands in contrast stark contrast to the successful communities I participate in which are all grassroots efforts. Need a great example of that? Take the now defunct Government Open Code Consortium (site is still up but clearly not in use). While the notion of the group was admirable, one of the reasons it failed the community they were trying to cater to didn't exist yet. Couple that with the fact that single goal of sharing source code involves all sorts of very frustrating hurdles (government lawyers, contracts, etc). It was simply too much to bite off.

Another cultural hurdle is that most online communities use things like instant messaging, IRC and a bunch of social networks like Twitter and Facebook....things that are often blocked by most web filters deployed by many government entities. Why? I believe that public perception is that all those things are simply time drains and while they certainly can be just that, the benefits that can be reaped from these communities far outweighs the abuse of that privilege by a few government workers.

I can only speak for state government where I've dedicated the past 6+ years of my life by saying that the problems that face state agencies are usually not unique within that state. More so, you can rest assured that when you add in other states all tasked with similar responsibilities you know there are a number of initiatives to solve problems all happening in their individual silos. Lumping in the federal government only exasperates the problem. All that collective knowledge working independent of one another without collaboration only to guarantee government will keep its perception of being inefficient and rigid. That has to change. The Government IT culture has to change.

Fortunately I've been put in a situation where I can actually try to address this lack of community by focusing first here on Iowa where I guess we have in the neighborhood of 150 developers and likely three times that when you include the other IT disciplines (networking, infrastructure, security, data management, etc). That's just state government. Now lump in all the cities and counties in Iowa . Then toss in the other 49 states with their counties and cities. Finish it all off by adding the federal government to the mix and I think you begin to feel the potential that community can has.

By focusing on the community and building relationships across the boundaries the top-down style government puts in place it will eventually become an entity of it's own and it is only when that community fits our earlier definition that we can begin to do really creative things like sharing knowledge, source code and resources (people, hardware, etc). I hope you'll follow me on this trek and that you recruit people you know in government IT to participate and be a part of something exciting. After all, without the people there is no community.