participation

How can you apply the concepts of open source to a living, breathing city? An open source city is a blend of open culture, open government policies, and economic development.

I derived these characteristics based on my experiences and while writing my book, The foundation for an open source city.

Characteristics such as collaboration, participation, transparency, rapid prototyping, and many others can be applied to any city that wants to create an open source culture. Let's take a look at these characteristics in more detail. » Read more

Code Across America is scheduled for February 22-24. It will be a weekend of community building and moving the needle for more openness in local governments across the United States.

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I know this might sound like an odd question. It first came up in a conversation I had with Gary Hamel, the eminent business thinker and one of the first people to recognize the importance of distributed co-creation and that it will change management in the 21st century. We were discussing how the power of participation could replace traditional management for purposes of coordination and what it's limits might be. We ended up using the analogy of building a jetliner as our best example of where tight coordination is required. This question has been nagging on my mind ever since. » Read more

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

Creative Commons is celebrating 10 years of helping artists, writers, technologist, and other creators share our knowledge and creativity with the world. We've been able to maximize our digital creativity, sharing, and innovation. For example, governments are using Creative Commons for their open data portals.

Earlier this year, the UC Santa Cruz library adopted a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license for all of its content. YouTube now has over 4 million videos available under Creative Commons, allowing everyone to remix and edit the videos. » Read more

As stressful as elections can be, they always bring a welcome surge of patriotism. United States citizens have a lot of opinions about their government, and election time is a good reminder that actually vollunteering time and resources is the best way to facilitate real change. Luckily we live in the 21st century, and collaborating to make change has never been easier. Apps like Shareabouts make it simple to get involved and do your part to make our cities great.

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A provocative research finding is that 75-90% of all large organizational projects fail to meet their original objectives, (Patterson et al. (2006)). The same research suggests human practices and behaviors—more than technical or financial matters—are at the root of the breakdowns. » Read more

I recently watched a new TED Talk by the first and former White House Deputy CTO Beth Noveck, delivered in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is really the initial instigator of the modern open government movement in the United States and is now working to make it a reality worldwide. What I like best about her talk is the litany of examples that are happening all over the world—from painting the national budget on hundreds of walls so that locals can comment on it to a Texas wiki that lets citizens and businesses comment on regulations. Take a look:

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In 2005, I started a new job working as the public geek at the Takoma Park Maryland Library, a public library in the Washington D.C. area. My main duty is helping youth and adults use the 28 public Linux stations. I started the job soon after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and one day found myself welcoming several Katrina refugees who had relocated to Takoma Park.

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As the Community Manager of GovLoop—a highly active online community connecting more than 50,000 public sector professionals—Andrew Krzmarzick suspects his role is pretty similar to leading an open source project.

The open source way guides the company's decisions, communications, and interactions. And open source solutions enable them to empower citizens around the country (and the world!) who don't want to wait for their cities to make updates to a page or build apps and resources that makes their lives easier.

Hear Andrew speak more on this at the 2012 National Conference for Government Webmasters this year on September 11th in Kansas City. He will discuss citizen generated initiatives—Hackathons, CityCamps, LocalWiki and Facebook pages—that provide the community with much needed, easy to navigate, web-based resources. » Read more