When innovating in government, the technology’s the easy part. Innovative efforts often do one of two things: They take long-established technology from the private sector and inject it into an agency, or They reimagine long-assumed processes from the citizen’s perspective. The ultimate meta yak shave If you want to innovate government, 90-day, 120-day, or six-monthRead… Read more »
It’s time we start treating our data with the same love and respect that geeks treat their code. It’s time that we begin treating data as open source, not simply as something to be published. Putting process on a pedestal Geeks learned some two-decades ago that precision and transparency are everything. If so much asRead… Read more »
When one tells the story of the Internet, a David and Goliath motif emerges. Every time a technical challenged is faced, a new standard is needed, or a new design pattern takes center stage, two camps eventually emerge: One camp, generally constituting more “enterprise” users, needs super serious tools for super serious business. This couldRead… Read more »
A petition was recently posted on We The People demanding that federally funded software be released under an open source license. Makes sense. The public should have access to what is technically their property. However, TechDirt posed the question of whether it should be released under an open-source license or public domain, and I’m afraidRead… Read more »
I was recently asked how I would architect a personalized dashboard experience for visitors to a large, customer-facing website. My response? I wouldn’t. A dashboard in a car or airplane makes sense. It’s not as if I could click “speedometer” while driving or press the “altimeter” button while flying. I simply need everything at allRead… Read more »
There are two kinds of software: cludgy software and open source. Think about it logically. When you (or your organization) is the only person that’s ever going to see something, you’re a lot more likely to “just make it work.” After all, who would ever know? 1 But the same logic that applies to sweepingRead… Read more »
Despite increasing public support (as well as a number of executive mandates) publishing public data in a machine-readable format is not as simple as pressing the “publish” button. Why? Equally important as exposing the information itself is fostering a vibrant developer ecosystem around it. By making the publishing agency, not the public, responsible for makingRead… Read more »
“Fix typo.” Not quite “one small step for man,” but a significant first nonetheless. These simple words, typed by an open-source developer operating under the pseudonym “iceeey,” may represent the first collaborative effort between the federal government and the broader open-source community, and surely represents a tangible win for the open-government movement as a whole.Read… Read more »
Most often, when we talk about open source in government, it’s talked about in one of two ways: either it’s the pitfalls of the federal IT procurement model that can’t seem to comprehend a world in which open-source is an option, much less potentially a superior choice (“acquisition as a roadblock“), or it’s reiterating theRead… Read more »
Over the past several years WordPress’s market share has enjoyed explosive growth across virtually every industry. Today, it powers nearly a quarter of new sites, and is the CMS of choice for more than two thirds of the top-million sites on the web making it the world’s most popular publishing platform by a long shot.Read… Read more »