John Scott

Director of Open Source Software and Integration at Mercury Federal Systems

John Scott is the Director of Open Source Software and Integration at Mercury Federal Systems with deep expertise in engineered systems and bridging the gap between decision-makers, scientists and engineers to develop policies for acquiring and deploying new technologies in the Department of Defense and US Government. He has focused his career on investigating and developing ideas for how large organizations design, construct and evolve extremely complex systems to meet National Security needs.

John currently leads the Defense Department’s Open Technology Development (OTD) initiative, sponsored by the Office of Secretary of Defense Advanced Systems & Concepts. OTD lays the groundwork for streamlined adoption of open source methodologies within DoD, which includes both the adoption of private sector open source software and the formation of internal communities of interest around DoD systems, including classified systems. The impact of these shifts in policy and business process include not only increased agility for the U.S. military, but also an enhanced ability to securely share capabilities with allies and bring both data and technology to bear in disaster response and humanitarian assistance operations.

Previous work as a consultant to DoD includes the development of new design and testing methodologies for military networks, and the development of complex systems modeling applications for distributed systems. He has a patent in this field. In tandem with his work for OSD, John serves as the chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association’s Command, Control, Communications and Computers (C4) division and is also a term member on the Council of Foreign of Relations.