Tony Fortenberry
Founder & CEOTony Fortenberry has been an advocate for free and libre technology for more than 30 years, in government and corporate leadership roles, most recently as public sector strategist at Red Hat. His path toward open solutions for the public sector began in 2002, when as a city government CIO he migrated the enterprise environment to open source — piloting Linux and OpenOffice on the desktop. In 2015 he led California's Child Welfare Digital Services (CWDS) initiative — the first large-scale state government initiative focused on cloud-native development, open source software, Agile methodology, and user-centered design, with a $1.2B multi-year budget and 350+ staff.
That experience convinced him the harder problem isn't technology; it's procurement. He contributed to California's open source policy statement and was the first to use the state's Agile Developer Pre-Qualified vendor pool, then helped develop the federal Digital IT Acquisitions Professional (DITAP) certification and directed its first cohort at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. He founded OGOV on the conviction that procurement optimization is the most direct lever for helping agencies create sharable solutions.
