open government - Page number 12

I love this video from Dave Cole (Senior Advisor to the CIO, Executive Office of the President) and Macon Phillips (White House Director of New Media). You hear the feds talk a lot about openness and transparency, but not often specifically about open source.  But here, you can see that the White House really gets it. » Read more

So 19 months into the Open Government Directive, we seem to have a backlash. The government has spent millions of dollars collecting, organizing, and cataloging its data to make it more available to the public. An unprecedented effort. Some of this data is frivolous, some of it is valuable, but I think we can all agree that more transparency is always — always — a good thing. » Read more

The GSA is currently planning forge.gov, which is widely assumed to be based on forge.mil, the much-discussed collaboration platform from the Defense Information Systems Agency, or DISA. forge.mil is a pretty incredible idea: a single destination for testing, certification, and software development in the Defense Department. » Read more

The following article is largely based on a talk by Andy Pethan and Colin Zwiebel, "State of Open Data in Education," at the LinuxCon 2010 education mini-summit.

What happens when you open data?

Six months ago, the MTA in New York released a dataset under GTFS, a format for transporation timetables. Timetables themselves aren't very interesting. What is interesting is what you can do with the data. » Read more

America held its first billion-dollar political race in 2008 – DVR use soared (no surprise there). A new lineup of over-produced ads and under-researched hit pieces have yet to hit primetime, and accountability advocates are already worried about November. » Read more

We got a chance to send a few questions to Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. We wanted to explore open source principles like transparency, community, and collaboration in his world.  And we got a chance to ask him about the Open Source World Summit in China--and why both Microsoft and the Linux Foundation want people to pay for Windows.

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At Gov 2.0 Expo last week, Joshua Robin, the Director of Innovation and Special Projects at the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, described how MassDOT was inspired by the simple concept of open data modeled by the National Weather Service.

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Towards the end of 2009, the office of the DoD CIO issued a memo clarifying their position on open source software. There were some misconceptions, misunderstandings, and just plain FUD surrounding their stance previously, and they wanted to make it clear that they considered open source just as viable for development as any other type of software.

We tracked down some very smart people--software security expert David A. Wheeler and Dan Risacher, who authored the memo in question--to help explain how the memo came to be, and what it means for the Government sector moving forward. » Read more

Dave Cole, Senior Advisor to the CIO of the Executive Office of the President, presented an awesome keynote to more than 3,000 attendees at DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 on April 21. His keynote was about open source in government, and he talked about how whitehouse.gov has become a platform to foster citizen participation. Although I found the technology part interesting, it was the philosophy and open source principles that Dave talked about that are enabling the executive branch of the United States government to be more open and transparent. » Read more