Open Government Week starts May 12

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Open Government Week starts May 12

From May 12 - 23, we'll highlight some great people and projects in open government, open data, and civic hacking. We'll also provide resources on how you can get involved yourself. To get you started, we created a resource that starts to answer: "What is open government?"


View the complete collection of Open Government Week articles

As people begin to think about and implement the idea of government as a platform, citizens often think about government as a vending machine. In a 2009 essay on Techcrunch, Gov 2.0: It's All About The Platform, Tim O'Reilly said, "Too often, we think of government as a kind of vending machine. We put in our taxes, and get out service: roads, bridges, hospitals, fire brigades, police protection... and when the vending machine doesn't give us what we want, we protest. Our idea of citizen engagement has somehow been reduced to shaking the vending machine."

In the book Citizenville, Gavin Newsom talks about how technology puts power in the hands of the people. Newsom argues that the world is changing too quickly for the government to respond and it's "time to radically rethink the relationship between citizens and government.

When you see the "open govt" image callout on an article, it is part of our collection of stories for Open Government Week. Share your favorites with friends and colleagues using the hashtag #opengov, and check out some of our latest reports on open source in government.

Collection of articles for Open Government Week

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Jason Hibbets is a Community Director at Red Hat with the Digital Communities team. He works with the Enable Architect, Enable Sysadmin, Enterprisers Project, and Opensource.com community publications.

4 Comments

We have too much govt now.

Then there should be plenty of ways for you to participate. How do you engage with your local and/or country government?

Jason

Agreed! Get involved and do something. Lets not take anything for granted and begin with offering solutions or get involved to understand how you can contribute.

Great read and thanks for sharing a short but articulate read which will help folks get beyond the open gov rhetoric. OK, small plug - Check out www.guelph.ca/opengov, where the City is coproducing an open gov action plan with the community while also field testing prototypes along the way (open data, OST worskshops, civic innovation labe etc.). We would love to hear your thoughts!

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