Back in February, the White House published a beta version of an open source environmental justice tool that features an interactive map of communities in the United States and indicators on climate change, clean energy and energy efficiency, clean transit and others. Based on an advanced formula it identifies disadvantaged communities that are marginalised, underserved and overburdened by pollution in order to inform policymakers' decisions related to climate in the Justice40 initiative. This initiative aims to provide 40 percent of benefits of certain Federal investments in seven key…

On 13 January the White House organised a meeting on improving security of open source software with actors representing governmental agencies, private sector and open source foundations. Acknowledging that open source is in almost all software solutions used nowadays and that it brings a unique value, the US government discussed the challenges and potential related to open source with major stakeholders in the field. The meetings are said to be continued in the future to respond to the widespread usage of open source and the need for ensuring its security. The meeting took the form of a group…

The U.S. Department of Defence CIO urged the Department to prefer open source over proprietary solutions. On 24 January 2022, the U.S. Department of Defence (DoD) Chief Information Officer John Sherman released internally (and published two days later) a Memorandum for the Senior Pentagon Leadership, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, the Commanders of the Combatant Commands, the Defence Agency and the DoD Field Activity Directors. Particularly, it provides the Department of Defence with new guidelines on software development and open source software, addressing the opportunities and…

The forensic network analysis project Dshell is one of the 24 repositories published by DEVCOM on Github. This Army Laboratory has opened its software projects to get feedback from external partners and the open source community – as a peer review process. Dshell has more than 5.300 stars on Github and the code has been copied more than a thousand times. Dshell is a US Army Research Laboratory project (DEVCOM). It is a framework for forensic network analysis. Although it has existed since 2014, it is still being worked on in an active open source community. Contributions saw a newly emerging…

The Inclusive Naming Initiative aims to help create international standards for the replacement of non-inclusive and harmful IT language with neutral terms, and share them to both industry and public sector. The renewed sensitivity towards diversity, triggered by the “Black Lives Matter” movement in the United States, affected the open source (OS) community too. Ranging from the Linux kernel to Red Hat, the open source community all around the world kicked off a series of projects and initiatives to tackle the issue of offensive terms within the programming language and documentation. The IT…

The communities behind OpenMRS count more than 3.000 individuals online and several public and private partnerships. OpenMRS is more than electricity-to-paper. It is a dynamic platform that are constantly developed on with the intention to give the ownership back to the hospital staff who are the designers of the partform used for fighting TB and HIV/AIDS aong other illnesses. Interests groups are popping up in the communites and making local contributions that fit specifical needs in the local areas. An important element in an Open Source project is the community and communities are…

The drone helicopter Ingenuity, landed on Mars on February 18, represents a success for the Open Source community, as it runs on a Linux operating system and is based on an Open Source Software framework, called F’ (“F Prime”). February 18 will be remembered as a historical date. For the first time, Mars is hosting the drone helicopter “Ingenuity” on its ground, as a result of the Mars Helicopter mission run by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The mission is a technology demonstration included in the broader NASA mission Mars 2020, whose main goal is to seek signs of ancient life and…