Last night, Github held a thank you party to celebrate a huge milestone, 1 million users. To put that in perspective, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the US employs around 1.3 million software developers. Even factoring in international and non-coders, they’ve got a serious percentage of the talent market.
Reaching 1 million users for any startup is awesome. Reaching 1 million software developers as users is a sublime network effect. For me, Github is not just a code repository. It’s a discovery system for brilliant people to find and leverage each other’s work product to innovate and hone their craft.
We find and follow all kinds of interesting gov 2.0 coders through forks, watching, issues and just googling ‘____ github.’ It’s a talent pool meets project management system meets science show off lab.
Github powers almost everything we do for code at Code for America. All of our documentation, projects, templates, cultural elements, daily and weekly stats dashboard and even our lunch dating all tie in through the OctoCat servers.
Beyond CfA, nearly every open government project, app contest entry, hack weekend or other major multi-person coding effort is happening free and open through GitHub.
I think it’s quickly becoming an underpinning piece of infrastructure in the open government movement.
Github, thanks for playing a part in hosting the open government movement.
Our Badgers & Pandas salute your OctoCats.
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