Open Source In State and Local Government

The Background

• LEADR: Law Enforcement Automated Data Replicator

• Large scale data collection and query tool• Installed in 3 states

Background

• The project started in the low country of South Carolina in 3 counties.

• There were 3 sheriff’s offices and 3 police departments initially installed.

• Many police departments share common Records Management Systems (RMS)

• Initial system installed was a closed source system.

The Switch to Open Source

• In 2003 grants were obtained to expand the system to 21 Agencies

• Quotes were given by the closed source vendor for a full license cost for each agency, even though they had already developed the adapter for a given RMS.

• A decision was made to Open Source and pay for the adapter development once, and do an install on common system.

Goals of the Open Source Project

• No additional cost to agencies after development.

• Use common technologies and data standards

• Make the software freely available to Law Enforcement agencies.

• Use open source and open data standards

• User and Operations manuals provided to customers

The Move to the State level

• During the 2nd phase of the data sharing project SLED wanted to pick the project up and move it to a state wide level.

• Within 1 year 175 agencies were brought into the system by publishing open data standards and communication protocols to RMS vendors.

• A joint effort between agencies and multiple companies brought everything on board quickly.

• The total cost of the project was $6.5 Million dollars

Advantages of Open Source and the Next State

• After the success of South Carolina, Tennessee wanted to implement LEADR

• Project goals– Bring in 250 agencies in the

first phase of the project.– Replace DB IV based RMS fat

client with open sourced webRMS system.

• Project was completed on time using the exiting code base at a cost of $750k

Conclusion

• Moving to open and non-licensed based software has saved the state millions of dollars in cost.

• SC spends on average $5k on support and maintenance.

• Same philosophy applied to License Plate Reader Warehouse (4 Installations)

• No cost to update the system to latest versions of the software

• State money is spent on features, not licenses.