Referencing the directive of the Obama administration for greater government transparency, participation, and collaboration, Gunnar Hellekson addresses the collaboration aspect of this directive, and suggests that the open source community ought to encourage the federal government to adopt open source practices. 

While the government already uses open source, it is less familiar with open source principles. Hellekson gives examples of both successful and unsuccessful open source applications, and shows that open source can be used to "fail faster", and thus arrive at a solution more quickly.

Hellekson says that the government is really just made up of individuals, and when we find those individuals who are doing good work, we ought to encourage them and publicize their successes, because when the government succeeds, we all succeed.