transparency - Page number 7

Every time there's an Open Your World Forum webcast, I mark my calendar. And every time, something comes up, and I miss the webcast. Fortunately for the absent-minded among us, you can get the webcasts on demand.

(Here's where I should also admit to having a short attention span--and loving the option to fast-forward!)

So this morning, I pulled up the Charlene Li webcast, Open Leadership. » Read more

A draft executive order from the Obama administration recently surfaced titled “Disclosure of Political Spending by Government Contractors.” If signed and implemented, potential contractors bidding on federal work would be required to disclose contributions and spending two years back. » Read more

Last week a friend of mine posted on Facebook, “I need a new lawnmower. Any opinions on what I should get?”

She received several responses. One person suggested a goat. Another posted a picture of an attractive shirtless man with bulging muscles gleaming with sweat as he worked in the yard. But others identified the pros and cons of various lawnmower brands for her. Based on those comments and reviews, she went with a Fiskar's momentum reel mower because it "won't need to be repaired."
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Red Hat's Global Support Services (GSS) organization is accountable for customer loyalty. In that capacity, we're in the business of solving complex technical problems experienced by our customers. In February of 2009, the GSS management team began a journey to determine if we could serve our customers better, and ultimately increase customer loyalty, by improving the ability of our highly trained technical support associates to collaborate with each other. The fundamental idea was that if we could take away certain structural, cultural, and procedural barriers that separated different groups of associates, we could increase the flow of knowledge, reduce the duplication of efforts, and ultimately provide customers with more accurate, more consistent, and faster results. » Read more

60 Minutes did a segment on The Equity Project (TEP). TEP is a charter school that is publicly funded and privately run in New York City by founder and principal Zeke Vanderhoek. The goal of TEP is to prove that attracting the best teachers and holding them accountable for results is essential to a school’s success. And guess what else—Vanderhoek also rewards these top-tier educators with salaries around $125,000 per year. » Read more

CityCamp is an international unconference series and online community dedicated to innovation for municipal governments and community organizations. It didn't start out that way. CityCamp started as a one-off event, literally from a tweet. That event turned out to be a success beyond expectations. People came from all over the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom. For two days at the University of Illinois, Chicago Innovation Center, more than a hundred people worked through this fledgling idea of using the web as a platform for local government and community action. As it turned out, people had been practicing local "Gov 2.0" for years, but it seemed like little to nothing connected the community of practice that would soon form. » Read more

Open source has achieved a bit of popularity in the tech world, and has even become a bit mainstream. I sadly think this means that many have and will continue to miss the point of what being open source really means. Open source doesn't just mean showing source code. Many people think that such code drops are the only thing necessary for open source buzz to take over. » Read more

Google Health is approaching its second birthday, and according to some, also near death. I can't help but speculate that if it is indeed shuffling off the digital coil, that its demise has something to do with a general unwillingness to hand over such sensitive information to a company that already knows so much about us as individuals. » Read more

One of the keys to a successful open source community is appropriate transparency. A community with strong values around transparency will also be likely to respect its participants privacy. Such a community will also be unlikely to have a copyright assignment benefiting a commercial party. Here's why.

An open source community arises from the synchronization of the individual interest of many parties. Each person: » Read more