Over the last 5 years there has been a revolution in how websites are run in government. Agencies of all sizes have been adopting open source and moving to govCMS. While at the Department of Human Services I played a leading role in transitioning humanservices.gov.au to govCMS. This has given me insight into the significant benefits of adopting open source.

In my experience teams that embrace this approach have an excellent capacity for change and the ability to rapidly respond to new opportunities. This is because the open source philosophy encourages knowledge sharing and an openness to learning from the experiences of others. In the broader web profession open source has been widely adopted because it can reduce costs for customers, improved productivity and created new business opportunities.

I’m making all the designs I developed while a student available under a creative commons licence. I’m doing this to leverage the intellectual property in these designs and create new opportunities. It would be exciting to see these designs adapted and improved by others.

I’ve also included a quick review of other plans that have been released under the open source approach. Finally, I’d like to hear your views and experiences with open source and licencing in the construction industry.