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Future of News & Civic Media @MIT

By Paul Winkler | Published: June 24, 2010
June 17th I was at MIT to attend the 2010 Future of News and Civic Media Conference. Civic hackers galore. More specifically I was there because of the "Data into Action" panel. Nick Grossman, my boss, was on the panel -- among other things, announcing OpenBlock. What's OpenBlock? In a nutshell, we'll be leading the effort to make the technology behind everyblock.com more accessible to newspapers that don't have a huge web budget. So a local paper could put up maps of "hyperlocal news" - stuff you care about happening in your neighborhood, down to the block level. Read on..

Also posted in Open Standards, all, data, government, open data, open government | 2 Comments

The State of Open Government

By Philip Ashlock | Published: May 26, 2010
What’s the state of the open government movement? What are the good examples and where is more attention needed? This overview goes through many of the open government initiatives that have been formalized as official government policies and looks to see what they say about the overall state of open government. Data.gov just recently had it’s Read more...
Also posted in Activity Feeds, Online Participation, Open Standards, all, open data, open government | 3 Comments

Public Software

By mkeating | Published: February 8, 2010
Instead of talking about Open Source Software, should we be talking about Public Software? Hypothesis: The most successful open source software projects are marketed to software developers and system administrators because those are the only people who understand and really value the open source nature of a piece of code. Open source is not a very Read more...
Also posted in Open Business | Tagged | 2 Comments

Cities Powered by Open Source

By Philip Ashlock | Published: January 29, 2010
February 9th Update: This post originally limited focus on the declaration of “equal” within these three cities open source policies, but I have expanded to also cover the issue of  defining “open source” and stipulating open source licensing for code developed in-house. San Francisco recently established a new policy requiring open source software to be considered Read more...
Also posted in open government | 7 Comments

Held hostage

By Nick Grossman | Published: December 8, 2009
There’s a nice post from David Eaves today on the need for a “MuniForge” — a repository for open source municipal software.  Without getting too into the details, I wanted to point out one line that really struck a chord with me, discussing the conundrum that governments find themselves in when procuring proprietary software: …most solutions Read more...
Also posted in government, open data | Tagged | 2 Comments