collaboration

Raleigh, NC—City Council adopts open source policy

Today, the Raleigh City Council passed an Open Source Government Resolution, unanimously, promoting the use of open source software and open data. The resolution includes language that puts open source software on the same playing field as proprietary software in the procurement process. It also establishes an open data catalog to house data available from the city. » Read more

What qualities make a city open source? Is it technology, government policies, or businesses? No. It's the mindset of the people. It's the philosophy and the culture.

About a year ago, I started trying to define an open source city.  I'm very interested in seeing my own city (Raleigh, NC) become a hub for open source and a leader in open government.  With Red Hat's announcement to stay headquartered in Raleigh earlier this month, the City of Raleigh appears poised to "establish a growing ecosystem of partners and providers around the open source leader and to bolster Raleigh’s reputation as a leading open source community."

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"Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals."

- Clay Shirky at TED Cannes in June 2010

This is one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite people in the business, Clay Shirky. I particularly like it because it illustrates the period many organizations find themselves in when trying to integrate social media internally. Before wikis were used by the Intelligence Community to develop reports on IEDs, people were creating user badges to show off their favorite NFL teams. Before my own company's Intranet won any awards, we had people talking about how they enjoy skinny dipping on their profile. Before our VPs starting using Yammer to communicate with the workforce, we had groups of Android geeks and fitness gurus.I'm telling you this because if you're implementing any type of social media behind your organizational firewall, you should prepare yourself, your colleagues, your bosses, your senior leadership for this one inexorable truth. » Read more

The principles of open source continue to have a huge influence on the science of management. Collaboration, transparency, community, and rapid prototyping are used frequently to describe  management innovations that are taking place in companies around the world.

We published a great collection open source business stories during 2011--here are a few of my favorites: » Read more

No one would dispute that teams are critical to an organization’s success. Yet many teams feel they're not performing as well as they should be. Poor team performance, especially among teams that work across departments or functions, tend to breed silos, competing agendas, turf wars, and indecision; high performance produces organizational coherence and focus. » Read more

There are innovative organizations that most of us find inspiring because on the inside, they're essentially passionate communities. But what do companies like Google, Red Hat, IDEO, Apple, 3M, and W.L. Gore have in common? And what defines a community of passion, anyway?

Over the past few months, I've been engaged in a Management Hackathon with a few folks you might recognize from opensource.com and some other members of the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX), an online community started by Gary Hamel. » Read more

When it comes to treating, curing, and preventing cancer, modern medicine has largely failed. You could argue that cancer is far too complicated to unravel in the few millenia we have been documenting it. Or that the billions we spend annually on research is far too little. Established incentives and policies that perpetuate research silos certainly seem to slow success. » Read more

As cities are facing growing demands and shrinking resources, they have to find new ways of solving problems. Change by Us, a new digital platform that enables citizens to collaborate on projects for city improvement themselves, is a promising model of a new kind of civic engagement. Launched in New York City earlier this year, the application is now being used in Philadelphia as well and is freely available for reuse through a open source license.

Not all work-from-home gigs are created equal. There is a vast ocean between being a member of a distributed team and just being a remote worker.

The groups of "remote worker" and "distributed team member" are neither a super-set nor a sub-set of one another. Insead, they can be represented as a typical Venn diagram. » Read more

This month, stories about people doing business the open source way have popped up in some surprising places. From an Israeli food manufacturer to the Wall St. Journal, here are some interesting news articles and blog posts on sharing, collaboration, hacking, and transparency I've read this month. » Read more