The Civic Commons Community

Civic Commons is a small team with a simple idea and big mission: to help the thousands of government entities share technology for the public good.

We can’t do it alone — Civic Commons is a community effort, so we’re we’re going to need your help.  Here are a few ways you can get involved today:

Join the conversation

The Civic Commons discussion forum is where we ask & answer questions regarding sharing government tech.  These discussions will not only help us build Civic Common’s knowledge base, but also further the collective understanding of the challenges, promise, and experience of sharing government technology.  This is a public mailing list, so feel free to read the archives, or ask a question by emailing discuss@civiccommons.org.

The Civic Commons blog is where we write about what we’re working and learning.  Check it out and be sure to add our RSS feed to your reader.

Help build the Civic Commons Knowledge Base

The Civic Commons Wiki is a great resource for documentation on topics related to open government technology, including open source policies, open data policies, and a growing list of civic open source applications.

We are also in the process of building a Civic Technology Legal Suite (led by one of our Code for America fellows, and IP lawyer, Michelle Koeth).

We also read a lot, and tag interesting articles using the civcoms tag on Delicious.  If you’re a Delicious user, please join us in collecting more articles about open civic technologies.

Check out the latest activity page to see what we’re been reading & writing.

Work With Civic Commons

Civic Commons works directly with governments and civic organizations to develop open technologies.  For example, we’ve led the Open311 initiative, working with many cities and companies to create an open standard for non-emergency issue reporting.  We’ve also helped open-source the Federal IT Dashboard and the Enterprise Addressing System (here’s a list of all of our current projects)

If you are interested in partnering with Civic Commons on an open civic technology project, first read more about how to engage with us, and then contact us.

Elsewhere

Civic Commons is just one of many civic technology organizations, many of which have online community spaces of their own.  We encourage you to join the conversation wherever your interests take you!

And more to come…

Civic Commons is a new organization.  The team is busy working on new projects & programs that will help governments collaborate on technology, and we’re just getting started.  Have an idea for what we should be working on? Let us know.