Author: Open North

Public sector executives and senior managers have an opportunity to lead digital transformation of mission-critical service delivery and operations within their organizations by embracing open source software solutions. To drive this transformation, they need to:
- Re-orient organizational culture to become open source software friendly
- Invest in staff capacity building
- Champion digitally-native approaches to procurement, budgeting and contracting that support open source software adoption
- Understand the fundamental differences between conventional proprietary software and open source software
- Leverage the potential of cross-jurisdictional collaboration to build and support open source software applications

The purpose of this course is to equip public sector executives and their colleagues with the ideas, tools and resources they need to overcome the challenges that are often associated with using open source software – and to take full advantage of its benefits. This course has been designed primarily from the perspective of non-technical executives, directors and departmental leaders, but will provide important insights for technical staff as well.

Estimated time to complete all course modules: 60 to 90 minutes.

These learning materials were developed by Open North. They were commissioned by the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service on behalf of the Public Sector Service Delivery Council and the Public Sector Chief Information Officer Council (Joint Councils).

Primary authors: Matthew Claudel (Field States), Steven Coutts (Open North)

Contributors: Ayesha Zamudio-Vazquez, Merlin Chatwin (Open North), John Griffin (Open North), Elena Findley-de Regt (Foundation for Public Code), Ben Cerveny (Foundation for Public Code)

We would also like to acknowledge the contributions of the Open Source Software Community of Practice: Guillaume Charest (Canadian Digital Service), Alexandre Cloutier (Canada Revenue Agency), Olivia Courney (Ontario Digital Service), Kevan Hannah (Ontario Digital Service), Alan Harnum (Ontario Digital Service), Katy Lalonde (Ontario Digital Service), Patrick McCabe (Nova Scotia Digital Service), and Bianca Tomazeli (Ville de Montréal)

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Suggested citation:

Open North. “Open Source Software in Government: A Course for Public Sector Executives – v1.0.” Institute for Citizen-Centred Service, 2022.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License. If you create an adaptation of this work, please add the following disclaimer along with the attribution:

This is an adaptation of an original work by the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service and Open North. Views and opinions expressed in the adaptation are the sole responsibility of the author or authors of the adaptation and are not endorsed by the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service or Open North.

Do you have feedback to share about our course? Send your comments and suggestions to us at info@opennorth.ca.