Peter Quinn resigns as CIO of Massachusetts

What can citizens do to encourage CIOs within their states to embrace open source? Any thoughts on getting industry analyst firms to encourage CIOs to embrace and become activists?

http://duckdown.blogspot.com/

This is a very interesting question. I don't know of any concerted effort by citizens to get gov't to embrace open source, but there are many in the community who have done work to make it happen. Leon Shiman of X.org and many of the Globus guys have dealt with the gov't for many years trying (and often succeeding) in getting them to use open source.

The citizen side is a bit easier than the analyst side--considering that analysts are generally paid, most gov'ts won't spend dollars for that type of research. Maybe a big firm will do a study for state/fed gov't and give it to them for free. But the gov't is so slow to move that it could take years for them to even read it.

There are a number of states-NY and CA to name a few, with CIOs that are already considering open source and many of whom are moving to Linux. Just like how open source in general has moved from the enterprise IT dept up to the execs it will happen in gov't as well. It will just be slow, like everything else there.

Updated story here