GitHub launches portal illustrating examples of government-citizen collaboration on open data, open source and open government

In an exciting and useful development, GitHub, the world’s best known portal for collaborative software development, has launched a portal illustrating how governments and citizens have worked together to deliver better outcomes.

Now live at government.github.com the portal provides some great examples of GitHub projects that have saved government money and time and delivered better outcomes through citizen participation.

The portal also links to GitHub hosted open civic projects that governments can reuse – at no charge – to enhance what they provide to citizens.

If you’ve been having trouble explaining to senior management or IT teams how collaborating on software and open data with citizens can deliver better outcomes, then this is a great source to demonstrate how other agencies have reached success.

And, in case you were wondering, policies and laws can be open sourced as well – all of Germany’s laws are available through GitHub, ready to be forked, edited and reused by other jurisdictions around the world. Learn more from the OKFN blog.