open source

March 19 will be here before you know it. Thousands of people will flock to Denver, Colorado for a week of learning and networking with Drupal community members. DrupalCon is the official conference of the Drupal community and draws an international audience. If you are not familiar with Drupal, it’s an open source content management platform that powers millions of websites--including opensource.com and whitehouse.gov. » Read more

Last month, I attended the 5th Annual Leadership North Carolina Forum. The day was filled with amazing information and thought-provoking ideas for the future. However, one session I attended kept me thinking. » Read more

I don't think any of us are surprised to find out that teachers matter. That has always been obvious, but what I did find interesting--and even surprising--about the information coming from the study on a teacher's long-term impact on a student conducted by Raj Chetty and John Friedman of Harvard University and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia University is the degree to which teachers matter. (See the executive summary or full presentation video.) Their research shows that having a good teacher benefits a child long after that one school year and that measuring a teacher's "value-add" each year is one useful element in evaluating that teacher's performance. » Read more

As we turn the calendar to the new year, we'd like to take a moment to reflect on what we've done here at Civic Commons over the past year, what we've learned, and where we're planning on heading next.

It's been a busy year for us. While the Civic Commons initiative began, slowly, as an informal partnership between Code for America and OpenPlans in early 2010, we really began working in earnest last May, thanks to generous startup support from the Omidyar Network, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Knight Foundation.

Since then, we've accelerated our work towards our broad goal: » Read more

Today, the US House of Representatives is hosting a 2-day conference about how they can be more open and transparent about what they do under the dome. They are exploring ideas and recommendations on how to create transparency » Read more

Are you a geek?

If so, driving the future of healthcare is now within your grasp.

What do you have to do?

Learn the M programming language, and teach it to others.

What’s the M programming language?

The M programming language is also known as MUMPS. Which stands for Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System.

M is a multi-user, strongly imperative language designed to » Read more

First of all, thank you. Yup, I was talking to you.

People like me tend to get the credit when things go right, and the axe when things don’t, but in the open source world it’s you who ultimately decides the fate of a project. Engineers and managers and designers work hard, this is true. None of that matters unless we have an involved community simultaneously pointing at the shiny object up in the clouds while holding our feet firmly to the ground. » Read more

Chris Lehmann is the principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I love reading his education-related tweets because of his many interesting ideas, insights and observations. There's another side to Chris, though. Chris is a rabid sports fan, and he'll unleash a torrent of tweets during certain sporting events. I can appreciate his sports fervor, but to me those sports tweets are more noise rather than signal. I'd love to be able to tell Twitter, “give me all of Chris Lehmann's education-related tweets and none of his sports tweets.” (I also want Chris to continue tweeting his sports tweets, because those are an essential part of who he is.) » Read more

The widespread internet blackout last week in protest at unbalanced legislation being rushed through the US Congress was dramatic and notable. I did have some questions though on why it was important to the open source community. The way the laws have been framed by their proponents makes them look as if they are all about file sharing and specifically music and video sharing. However, the problem with them is they create badly-bounded new powers that are likely to exploited in ways that fall outside the frame. » Read more

Selling the idea of open data seems straightforward. If taxpayers paid for it, a government should share it. But there have to be exceptions for National Security and privacy. » Read more