As promised, the code for the federal IT Dashboard has now been released to the public as open source software. Any government can use it — for that matter, any contractor can pick up the code and offer deployment or other services based on it, which is a key ingredient for making it usable in practice by [...]
In the last weeks of 2010, we solidified our web presence by acquiring the “civiccommons.org” and “civiccommons.net” domain names, and we’d like to start off the New Year by thanking Countywide Community Forums for giving us those domains on very generous terms. Countywide Community Forums is actually an interesting Gov 2.0 effort itself. They provide [...]
We’re pleased to announce that San Francisco’s Enterprise Addressing System has now been open sourced! EAS is a web-based system for managing the city’s master database of physical addresses, tied to Assessor’s parcels and the City’s street centerline network. We posted a short screencast of EAS in action a couple of months ago, and since [...]
Lawrence Grodeska, Internet Communications Coordinator at San Francisco Department of the Environment, is steering a diverse group of local agencies to create something greater than the sum of their parts: a centralized database for residents to find businesses that offer recycling, reuse and hazardous waste disposal services in the Bay Area. Enter your location and [...]
We’ve been looking at government publications systems lately, partly at the instigation of Beth Noveck, who leads the U.S. government’s Open Government Initiative [1]. Two of the most interesting are the Federal Register 2.0 and New York Law School’s CityAdmin system — they come at the problem from opposite directions, and comparing them is instructive. Federal Register [...]
Civic Commons was born, appropriately, because several people had the same idea at the same time, and were able to pool their resources to get something off the ground. So far it has run as an informal consortium, led by the Office of the CTO of the District of Columbia, Code for America, and OpenPlans. [...]
We’ve been talking to government IT departments at many levels about how to use open technologies, and how to release their in-house code for other jurisdictions to use. In that process, we’ve made a couple of profound discoveries: Everyone would love to open up their code, as long as it doesn’t cost anything to do [...]
We’ve been having some very exciting discussions with the San Francisco Department of Technology. They’re developing an “Enterprise Addressing System” (EAS): web-based software to help the city manage its master database of addresses, tied to the Assessor’s parcels and the City’s street centerline network (the project was initially called the Master Address Database, or MAD). [...]
Last week we were thrilled to launch Civic Commons at the Gov 2.0 Summit, sponsored by O’Reilly and UBM TechWeb. District of Columbia CTO Bryan Sivak and Director of CivicWorks for Open Plans Nick Grossman presented an overview of the need, goals, and role of the new organization. For those of you who couldn’t make [...]
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Be Open from Day One, not Day N.
Posted on January 27, 2011 by Karl Fogel in Commentary
This might be the most important blog post I write all year (and it’s January now), so I’ll get straight to the point: If you’re running a government software project and you plan to make it open source eventually, then just make it open source from the beginning. Waiting will only create more work. It’s [...]