openness

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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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

Creative Commons recently launched their 2011 Creative Commons annual campaign: You are the power of open. Creative Commons has a significant influence on open government efforts, at all levels of government, worldwide. » Read more

This should come as no surprise: Open source principles are great guidelines for conducting successful collaboration sessions. What wasn’t as obvious to me was that the different principles are more important in different collaboration situations. Imagine the concepts of trust, openness, transparency, and release early, release often as ingredients in a mix, controlled by a row of dials. The environment determines how much you need to 'dial up' or 'dial down' each characteristic. » Read more

Almost every time I’ve turned on the television in the past week, I've seen an ad for Google Chrome. What started earlier this year as a sprinkling of ads here in the United States has become a torrential downpour.

For me, Google has long been one of the poster children for a new breed of company born in the age of the Internet that doesn’t need to rely on traditional advertising to build its brand. » Read more

My theme this week is organizational openness and transparency and today I'd like to highlight a fantastic example of an organization that has built a culture with openness at its core: Mozilla.

Most of you probably know Mozilla as the organization famous for its open source Firefox web browser. But what you may not know is that open source is more than just a technology decision for Mozilla; the open source way is deeply ingrained in every aspect of its culture. » Read more

As dispiriting as the recent debt ceiling dysfunction drama has been, the most disturbing plot point is not that our leaders can’t seem to compromise—but that they are so compromised. While the pundits continue to parse the no-win “deal” and the bloviators bemoan the failures of leadership, the rest of us might take the opportunity to consider the benefits of being uncompromising. » Read more

If you haven't heard a keynote about the wonders of the cloud, you haven't been to an open source conference lately. But Mårten Mickos' LinuxCon cloud keynote was more than that--it was really a freedom keynote.

"FOSS has an 'F' as in freedom, and in fun, and the future," Mickos said. "Many of us do it because of 'F' as in fun. But we have a duty to civilization to protect freedom--to protect that what we open, others don't close." » Read more

By the end of 2010, more than 400 million works had been licensed with Creative Commons licenses. That's 400 million musical compositions, news items, academic manuscripts, artworks, blueprints, presentations, photographs, books, blog posts, and videos whose owners believed traditional copyright restrictions didn't allow their creations to properly circulate, grow, and flourish. » Read more