I was recently discussing open source policy with a friend in the Australian Government whose agency is working on a whole-of-government standard that encourage

I was recently discussing open source policy with a friend in the Australian Government whose agency is working on a whole-of-government standard that encourages open source. She told me that many departments who don't currently have much experience in open source express the concern that if they open source their code, they've got to deal with all the issues that come with maintainership of an open source project. Her opinion, though, was that the first and foremost reason for encouraging agencies to release their code is transparency and accountability - it's taxpayer money, after all - and that even chucking up a plain old tarball is a great start. As for running an open source community - well, cross that bridge when you get to it. It's entirely possible that no-one actually cares about contributing to your codebase. It's entirely possible that you're not going to have to deal with contributions larger than typo fixes. If you do end up getting larger contributions, write your policy and your process when you need it. If you're in the parts of government that are encouraging a move towards openness, tell other agencies that it's fine if they don't have a fully developed open source strategy. Get their code up on GitHub somewhere first, prove that the sky won't fall in, and just get them comfortable with the concept of open source. Once we've achieved the first objective of getting source code out in the open at all, then we can worry about the rest.