Leading successful government-academia collaborations using FLOSS and agile values

Author(s)

Wen, Melissa ^[1] ; Siqueira, Rodrigo ^[1] ; Lago, Nelson ^[1] ; Camarinha, Diego ^[1] ; Terceiro, Antonio ^[2] ; Kon, Fabio ^[1] ; Meirelles, Paulo ^{[3, 1]}

Affiliation

^[1] Univ Sao Paulo, IME, Sao Paulo - Brazil

^[2] Linaro Ltd, Sao Paulo - Brazil

^[3] Fed Univ Sao Paulo UNIFESP, Sao Paulo - Brazil

• Document type: Journal article
• Source: JOURNAL OF SYSTEMS AND SOFTWARE; v. 164, JUN 2020.
• Web of Science Citations: 0

Abstract

Government and academia share concerns for efficiently and effectively servicing societal demands, which includes the development of e-government software. Government-academia partnerships can be a valuable approach for improving productivity in achieving these goals. However, governmental and academic institutions tend to have very different agendas and organizational and managerial structures, which can hinder the success of such collaborative projects. In order to identify effective approaches to overcome collaboration barriers, we systematically studied the case of the Brazilian Public Software portal project, a 30-month government-academia collaboration that, using Free/Libre/Open Source Software practices and agile methods for project management, developed an unprecedented platform in the context of the Brazilian government. We gathered information from experience reports and data collection from repositories and interviews to derive a collection of practices that contributed to the success of the collaboration. In this paper, we describe how the data analysis led to the identification of a set of three high-level decisions supported by the adoption of nine best practices that improved the project performance and enabled professional training of the whole team. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 14/50937-1 - INCT 2014: on the Internet of the Future
• Grantee: Fabio Kon
• Support Opportunities: Research Projects - Thematic Grants