>> Important place in that history right now is that we're-- >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering Red Hat Summit 2017 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. I'm joined by Todd Wilson and Shea Phillips of the BC Developers Exchange. Thanks so much for joining us today. >> Thanks for having us. >> So the BC Developer's Exchange, you described it to me before the cameras were rolling as helping the British Colombian government think differently. Talk a little, explain, unpack that a bit for our viewers. >> Sure, so it's been a journey for us. We've evolved over awhile, so we've been going for about three years now. What we wanted to do, we recognized that government had fallen behind in its technology practices and technology utilization and we were trying to participate in the tech industry that's growing in BC and we were finding that it was a pretty big gap in understanding. We didn't really speak the same language, we didn't really understand what their needs were, they didn't understand how to work with us and so we started exploring ways to connect better. So one of the things we recognized that we had on our side was technology assets of data. We have tons and tons of data that's valuable to the tech industry to use for their apps. So we first started by opening up that data and then realizing that just open data is part of the story. We need APIs so providing API access and that was just kind of part of the story. We needed to actually start collaborating on solutions. So then we brought the Province into GitHub and we're doing open source collaboration on GitHub and it's kind of morphed into a much bigger picture than we originally started with but it's been a really exciting way to work. >> And your realization that the government was a little bit behind here or you were working in a different track than the government, that's not uncommon, wouldn't you think? The government is not known for innovative practices. So did it take, did it take some persuasion on your part? >> I think that you know, it's mixed. So there are certainly factions within the government that there's a bit of pent up demand, right? So there are people who are very quick to kind of get on the train and then there are other groups who do need convincing and it's kind of a work in progress. So we're building collaboration across government all the time but we certainly didn't have trouble finding people within government and within the tech community who wanted to come along with us. >> So talk about some of the projects that you're working on to make government run better. >> Sure, so there's a couple of examples of how moving into the open source just made sense for government. One example that we've used in a sort of why GitHub makes sense for what we're doing, the Environmental Reporting Branch of the Ministry of the Environment is responsible every year for producing a report on the water quality, air quality, all the basic things that the environmentalists you know, care about and all of the different universities and academic institutions consume this report and then do their analysis on it. One of the things that was always a challenge is there was always kind of wondering, are these numbers cooked? Are you guys actually reporting on the actual findings or are you cleaning it up a little bit? So what the Environmental Reporting Office was able to do is they published the code on GitHub, the data in our Open Data Catalog and it was all there 100% transparent for anybody to recreate the results. So they could download the code, have it running on their laptop. They could download the data, bring it in and run the numbers. What ended up happening after a few months, they got an issue in GitHub. Somebody created an issue, said it's broken, it's not working, I can't get it to go and a little bit of investigation and they found out that the nature of the data, one of the datasets they were using had changed. So it broke the program and so the developer that was responsible for it wasn't going to fix that until next year, next time to run the report. So he said thanks for pointing out the error but you know, I'll be fixing that next year and a day or two went by and all of a sudden out of nowhere he got a pull request in GitHub. The guy who discovered the issue actually went away on the weekend and fixed the code himself and said here, I fixed it for you, it's all ready to go. And so that's sort of that whole community spirit that just starts to grow naturally when citizens can engage with government on such a personal level and work on something together and collaborate in a space that previous to that had been kind of adversarial. There wasn't a lot of trust there, there wasn't sort of that good feeling of are we getting the right information? All of a sudden to turn into a real collaborative partnership, that's the model that we want to see. >> Well I'm wondering if we could turn that example into a real metaphor for what we'd like to see overall with a more engaged citizenry who is people who want to work alongside or with government to solve these problems. >> Exactly yeah, we're all living in the same space. We're all using the same resources. You know, the government is there for the citizens and it's by the citizens, so to be able to work together and work openly is a real strength, real power play. >> So that environmental code that you just gave was a great example. Talk about some other ways that you're working with the government. >> So one example that we have is sort of in an internal sharing scenario. So previously when applications were built within gov, there wasn't an easy way for applications to be shared across different ministries or agencies. So they'd get built and they'd kind of get locked away and used for that one particular business function. What we've been able to do with GitHub and by having shared code is to have projects come along and actually borrow what's been done already and repurpose those applications and that gives them a great starting point. So there's a lot of common things that every application would have to figure out and so by having these starter kits essentially, development teams can get a leg up on taking on new projects and so that reduces the time to market and the cost ultimately and also makes things a little more consistent. >> And what about the project you did with the highways? >> Okay, so that was one where there was a collaboration on a standard for reporting of road incidents. So it's called Open 511 and so this was an international standard that was being developed. So there's various States in the US and Provinces in Canada and a couple of other international jurisdictions that collaborated on this specification for highway event APIs so that data could be shared easily. So the Ministry of Transportation in BC participated in that and collaborated and contributed to it but then they also exposed their data using these APIs. But then they didn't end up building anything on it, they just kind of said here, it's available to use. Go figure it out. So what we really wanted to do there is it's really not the government's job to be building all of the end product apps. We're kind of the resource store for the building blocks and then what ended up happening, an opportunity got recognized by a mobile app developer in Victoria, they saw an opportunity to take these APIs and build a little notification app so that if you put your route in, it'll ping you notifications if there's obstructions or traffic or whatever may have you and show you the webcam image that is on your route. So a really interesting solution that gov never would have built. Like we would never have built a mobile app for that. >> Do you, how do you ensure security? That's one of the biggest themes of this conference is making sure the data is in fact secure, it's what you hear over and over again as a big concern. How do you address that? >> Do you want to, oh yeah I was getting to that. So we have a data center that we run in partnership with HP and the data resides on premise in that data center. What we're using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is sort of all the front end facing interfaces would go through OpenShift. So when people are accessing the data, the access in controlled through gateways and however projects get set up in order to control that access. Meanwhile the data is still sitting securely in the network zone back at the mother ship. So what we've found with the OpenShift Container Platform is the developers don't necessarily need to worry about a lot of the tactical policies and network policies that are part of that security standard because that's handled by the platform. When we build OpenShift, we built it compliant to all those policies and so developers can come in to the platform, just start working and as long as they're not punching out data that has personal information out to the internet, you know of course there's things they could do wrong, but as long as they're using the platform as it was intended, they're compliant right from day one. >> In terms of recruiting and retaining talented developers and talented technologists, do you find that a challenge? I mean as we said before, you don't necessarily think of the government as this hotbed of innovation and creativity. Is it difficult to get the best and the brightest to come work for you? >> I think that was actually part of the strategy around adopting tools like containers and open source was actually to make gov more compatible with the IT market. So using the same tools that the private sector uses, so there's a more seamless transition from a recruiting perspective and people can, you know they're not sort of going back in time when they go and work with government. So that was definitely a deliberate part of the strategy. >> So it's the tools but then also the projects. Are you finding coders and engineers who are, who want to dig into these projects? >> They do but we want to work with them in a different way. So we don't necessarily want every developer to be a gov employee. That's really not the model. We would never scale properly that way. So what we've done is we've created a new procurement method. So in government, procurement is hard like it is in a lot of enterprises. Contracts and all of these things get complicated and take time and you have to wait maybe a few months before you actually get the resource that you need. So what we've done is shortened that timeline down as much as we can and also micro-sized the work as much as we can. So if a project is running on GitHub and they have an issue, they can post that issue and put a dollar sign associated with it from 1,000 to $10,000 and kind of do a bounty and say hey development community, we want this fixed, can you do it? So developers can engage with that. They can write a short proposal, 100 words or less of what they will do and then if they get assigned the work and we accept the pull request, we will pay them using PayPal or write them a check or however they want right on the spot. So we can go end-to-end from problem, proposal, code and solution literally in a couple of days whereas before that would have taken a few months and the engagement would have been much larger and much more expensive. >> And are you finding that that is in fact having the impact you want in terms of the workforce that you're trying to attract? >> Yeah, Shea, you want to? >> Yeah, I think there's definitely been interest in the private sector, kind of independent freelance developers are generally pretty excited about this and some of them are downright shocked to see that this is such a progressive thing that the gov has undertaken. >> Yeah, we've had comments from developers saying oh, I never knew working with gov was this easy and that's the way we like to hear it. >> And hopefully it will become easier, too. We think about the government and the technology industry not necessarily working together, particularly when it comes to this new digital world that we're living in and we hear so much about the benefits of automation but also the fact that automation is going to have a big impact on jobs. Do you think that the government and tech need to be thinking together about the effects of this and working together to make sure that we aren't seeing more displaced workers? >> Absolutely, I mean I think we're, you know no one has a crystal ball. Nobody can tell what's going to happen but if we don't start thinking proactively about some of these issues, workforce issues, we're going to be caught flat-footed and so one of the things that we've been trying to prove along is automation doesn't necessarily mean losing jobs and so we've been trying to explore what the workforce shift looks like. So what we find within the little corner of sort of DevOps automation that we're doing is it's not that we're taking jobs away from people, we're just moving them to a different part of the value stream. So they're usually moving further up the value stream closer to the business so that they're actually much more engaged with the day-to-day business of gov and less engaged just with the tech and the plumbing. So by moving automation in, we're actually connecting the business and the technology closer together. >> What are some of the future projects that you envisage working closely with the government to change the way citizens engage with government? >> Sure, we've got a couple of big projects coming up where we are looking at different models of reaching citizens in meaningful ways. So there's a sort of personalized service or some kind of citizen dashboard, however you want to phrase that. That's one of the things that's on our wish list of wouldn't it be great if. We also have partnerships that we're looking to explore in different areas with sort of big data and data analytics. Because government has so much rich resource data, we're looking for ways to get that out and get that available but one of the challenges is just the sheer size of it. So the big data equation and big data analytics are very interesting things for us in the future because if we can provide expertise in that area, then tech sector and industry partners can come and participate with that data and just make it better. >> Well thank you so much for joining us Todd and Shea, I appreciate your time. >> Great, thank you. >> We'll be back with more of theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit 2017 after this. (up tempo electronic tones)