opengov

It is hard to think of any environment as conducive to innovation as the Internet. With a good idea and the motivation to follow it through, anything is possible. Look at Wikipedia, the Google search engine, and Facebook, to name just a few success stories.

Behind them are thousands of less famous web-based innovations that are also having a huge impact on society. These include many thousands of small firms and individual web developers based in Europe.

Collaboration is vital. Technologies do not emerge out of the blue. They are built on innovations by others – building-block technologies that are offered up as industry standards. » Read more

Last January, the City of Raleigh partnered with the Raleigh Chamber of Commerce, North Carolina State University, and local businesses to host the inaugural Innovation Summit. The purpose of the summit was to bring business leaders, entrepreneurs, marketers, investors, city officials, and thought leaders together for an afternoon of discovery. Open source was at the heart of how the organizers were looking to achieve consensus from those invited to participate.

There were four main topics organizers focused on to kick off this initiative: funding, partnerships, branding, and space for an innovation center. The summit started with two keynote speakers that helped set the stage for the day. » Read more

A couple of years ago I wrote a Globe Op-Ed "A Click Heard Across the Public Service" that outlined the significance of the clerk using GCPEDIA to communicate with public servants. It was a message - or even more importantly - an action to affirm his commitment to change how government works. For those unfamiliar, the Clerk of the Privy Council is the head of the public service for the federal government, a crude analogy would be he is the CEO and the Prime Minister is the Chairman (yes, I know that analogy is going to get me in trouble with people...) » Read more

Six reasons why government is not more innovative

Steve Denning recently wrote a great post titled How To Make Government Innovative Again. In his post Denning asks the following:

Why isn’t the Government generally more agile? Why isn’t innovation part of everything government does? Denning’s answer to these questions are: "Simple. The constraints on talented people who work in government agencies are enormous." Denning lists six reasons why government is not more innovative. » Read more

The first half of CityCamp Kansas City was productive, collaborative, and eye-opening. The morning was overflowing with open source knowledge, the sharing of ideas, and expert talks. The event started with 14 lighting talks–a ton of information crammed into a five-minute talk.

More than 150 attendees learned about the Google Fiber initiative, spatial city mapping, SeeClickFix, Bike Walk KC, Open Missouri, and much more. Then I got to share the open source stories from Raleigh, NC in my presentation, "How open source is changing citizen engagement." [PDF] Based on the initial feedback from a few folks, it was inspiring and "sparked the individual/collective imagination." » Read more

You want to get more involved with your government, but the red tape and politics are overwhelming. Maybe you just want "the facts" to make your own informed decision. This is where start-up project EveryVote comes in. This is not an open source electronic voting project. EveryVote wants to encourage citizens to take a more active and informed role in their government.

» Read more

The exploration of open government and civic participation in Kansas City has already begun. This weekend, a new chapter begins. A chapter that will include open source, open data, citizen engagement, a Bike Walk hackathon, and more. In fact, it might materialize into several chapters that could start with rapid-fire lighting talks and end with dueling mayors who are innovating beyond borders. And what would a CityCamp be without an unconference? That's a whole chapter by itself.

Meet Jase Wilson, a civic entrepreneur and CEO of Luminopolis. He's one of the main organizers for CityCamp Kansas City. Before I head out to Kansas City this weekend, I wanted to know more about the event and the open government movement in the Kansas City metro area. Here's my interview with Jase Wilson. » Read more

One of the first publicly available open dataset/API from the City & County of Honolulu is the one made available by O`ahu Transit Services, provider of The Bus service. With open data, anyone could develop an app using The Bus API and three such apps were built, Hea.theBus.org, Allb.us and an iPhone app called DaBus. Both Allb.us and DaBus were developed as a result of the City's CityCamp Honolulu and Hackathon, this past December 2011 and January 2012, respectively. » Read more

A report on the City of Helsinki's pilot project for the use of OpenOffice in the public administrations leaves the public with more questions than answers. The city trialled the Free Software productivity suite on the laptops of council members for ten months in 2011. The suite enjoyed high approval rates among its users. When the pilot was finished, the City produced a report stating that the costs of migrating the entire administration to OpenOffice would be very high. » Read more