Nobody wants to go first because they pay for everyone.<p>One solution is to have everyone agree to put limited resources on a shared project that they will all use, but this has problems. Many projects fail or don&#x27;t go as well as hoped. The distributed nature of it may increase the possibility of failure and the politics as well.<p>Another option is to get everyone together and agree on specs. Then outsource it with the requirement to the provider that the result be open source. After that first development effort you can all collaborate. This should go over better in government than in industry because your different groups aren&#x27;t competing with each other.