transparency - Page number 5

How do you celebrate the creativity of your community without falling into a rigid planning process? You open source it. By tapping into individuals' passions, their willingness to collaborate, and creating a culture of transparency, you can light a spark that will inspire unpredictable--yet reproducible--results. » 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

Clay Shirky, known for his books Cognitive Surplus and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations» Read more

Last week, the Iceland Constitutional Council, made up of 25 Icelandic citizens, presented a bill to their parliament outlining a new constitution. The bill contains 114 articles in nine chapters, and includes elements for a more open government. It appears that the population will be given the chance to vote on the new constitution after the Alþingi (national parliament) reviews the draft.

In April 2011, Iceland decided to rewrite their constitution by crowdsourcing ideas and suggestions from the Internet. We've taken a look at the draft constitution and there are several articles that create a more open government for Iceland. » Read more

The Open Source Food panel raised a diverse and complicated array of ideas about what exactly open source is and how it can be applied to food from software, hardware, social, and research perspectives. The conversation began by talking about how large amounts of information about where, who, and how our food is grown, as well as what processes touch it before it even gets to us, are often not available to the average individual. » Read more

Twitter offers customer service access on problems that you couldn't have reached before: the little things. (I've heard they count.) There's a huge opportunity for companies to interact with their customers in a way they haven't before, but a lot of them are still ignoring it. Or worse, they think they're using it, but they're completely missing the point.

BT (Before Twitter) » Read more

I’ve written before about the genuine renaissance open source software represents and the vast implications that openness provides. I’ve admitted that computer science, based on its relative unwillingness to share great ideas, has lagged behind other hard sciences in its understanding of how and where value is created. » Read more

After the recent economic crash, many governments had to overhaul both financial structure and fiscal regulation. The majority, including the US government, formed a plan of attack using the same bureaucratic and economic venues in use for centuries. Politicians come to the table with plans and ideas based on their own thinking and research. Some use these opportunities to filter in their own agenda, hidden in layers of jargon and political colloquial, to be reviewed and passed (or passed on) by a body of politicians behind closed doors. » Read more

"There is no standard Google anymore," says Eli Pariser in a recent TED talk. And he's right. Try it. Google the same thing as the person sitting next to you and compare the results. Chances are, they're different. According to Pariser, that's because Google uses as many as 57 different signals to determine the unique search results it serves you. » Read more

Today in his Open Source Bridge keynote, Mayor Sam Adams of Portland, OR announced Project City Sync, the next step in making local and regional governments more transparent.

Adams called on the attendees to help put coherence to city work, to help link up governments, and to put some framework to those interactions through the new project, which is currently live in beta. » Read more