open government - Page number 3

At the end of August I wrote a short post about an important reform that modified the rules for software adoption within the Italian public administration.

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A clear majority in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city's IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.

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It's been a great year for the open source movement in government. I feel like we've moved the needle on the transparency, collaboration, and participation fronts. More importantly, the open government movement saw a fair amount of code released under open source licenses and lots of activity in the open data space.

In 2012, we discussed a variety of topics on opensource.com. » Read more

I wanted to share my notes with you all from this TED talk with Clay Shirky. You can watch the video—and I recommend that you do—but since I took notes I figured I’d share my textual summary as well!

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Open government means different things to different people. Is it about transparency, collaboration, or participation? Maybe it’s a combination of all three? If you listen to Tim O’Reilly speak about open government, he'll tell you about his vision of government as a platform. 

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The petitions for Texas and other states to secede from the U.S. on the White House’s "We the People" site have drawn a great deal of attention in the past couple of days. I find it highly ironic that people are protesting following the re-election of the Administration by using the very platform set up by said Administration for grassroots advocacy. That being said, it’s also a testament to the idea that open government works—even for those who believe it doesn’t.

Let’s recap.   » Read more

The Code for America Brigade recently launched Race for Reuse. It's a different kind of contest that aims to increase adoption of existing open source projects with real dollars. The goal isn't to build something brand new—it's to encourage volunteer teams (called "brigades") across the U.S. to stand up and support existing open source projects. Because one of the more difficult parts of deploying open source apps is building the user community around the projects and getting citizens engaged.

There are four apps that brigades are competing with: » Read more

While preparing to attend the 4th Military Open Source Working Group meeting, it was refreshing and affirming to receive a notification for the event dress code:

Please remember that this is an open source software event and in honor of the glorious developers, casual attire is expected. In the event you come wearing a coat, a T-shirt will be provided to you at the door. 

My love affair with cities, San Francisco in particular, started early. Though my parents moved from San Francisco to the suburbs before I turned one, we visited the city often. One of my earliest memories of the City: In the family car driving up Interstate 280, face pressed to the window, I look out at the houseboats anchored in Mission Creek and wish that I could live there.

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According to the 2012 Web Index Report, modern technologies are critically under utilized in Ireland—making the work of citizens like Denis Parfenov significantly challenging. If he wants to open up the Irish government, he's got to find a way to open up the data.

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