Is Civic Hacking Becoming ‘Our Pieces, Loosely Joined?’

I’ve got a piece up over on the WeGov blog at TechPresident – Is Civic Hacking Becoming ‘Our Pieces, Loosely Joined?‘

Juicy bit:

There is however, a larger issue that this press release raises. So far, it appears that the spirit of re-use among the big players, like MySociety and the Sunlight Foundation*, only goes so deep. Indeed often it seems they are limited to believing others should re-use their code. There are few examples where the bigger players dedicate resources to support other people’s components. Again, it is fine if this is all about creating competing platforms and competing to get players in smaller jurisdictions who cannot finance creating whole websites on their own to adopt it. But if this is about reducing duplication then I’ll expect to see some of the big players throw resources behind components they see built elsewhere. So far it isn’t clear to me that we are truly moving to a world of “small pieces loosely joined” instead of a world of “our pieces, loosely joined.”

You can read the rest over there.

Original post