Brian Purchia of Burson-Marsteller has a post over on GovFresh about the value of open source to unions. His argument pivots on cost-savings. I think you could make a more expansive argument that includes risk mitigation and innovation, but describing the advantage to unions is an interesting angle I hadn’t seen before.

Earlier this year, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom ignited an open source movement in government when the city approved the nation’s first open source software policy. Now, another movement — labor may be getting behind this effort. I have been asked to speak with Local 21 of Professional & Technical Engineers (IFPTE/AFL-CIO) today about Gov 2.0 initiatives I helped lead for Newsom and why unions should embrace open source technology.

Colorado’s newly-appointed Chief Data Officer Micheline Casey shares on thoughts on her new job and all things open data with Government Technology‘s GTtv. (HT @adrielhampton)

British Columbia’s top climate protection official and Gov 2.0 Radio host Adriel Hampton discuss how hackers and open government data are helping Canada tackle global warming (British Columbia Climate Action Secretariat James Mack on “Apps for Climate Action).

I was really pleased to read the announcement that Lockheed Martin's social networking platform, EurekaStreams, was released as an open source project today. Lockheed is a very conservative company, and while they're happy to use open source internally and on projects for their customers, this is their first experiment with actually running a project themselves. I think it's a big deal, not just for Lockheed Martin, but for large corporations who are considering a more open, more innovative approach to software development. And yet, Dana Blankenhorn hates it:

There has been some pretty good discussion lately going around the Interwebs about what Gov 2.0 and open government looks like. I can’t say that I agree with everything that has been thrown out there with a Gov 2.0 label on it, but I can say without equivocation that this is the opposite of OpenGov and Gov 2.0.

The Federal Register has launched a re-design of its Website, federalregister.gov. The new site is XML-based and was developed using open source code (now available on GitHub).

“The Daily Journal of the United States,” the FR is managed by the Office of the Federal Register (OFR) of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) and serves as “the legal newspaper of the U.S. government and contains rules, proposed rules, and public notices of federal agencies, as well Presidential documents.”

Many governments are facing a perfect storm: smaller budgets, less staff, higher citizen expectations, retiring baby boomers, legacy systems and broken processes among other obstacles.

The Economist recently featured a special report on innovation in emerging markets. This report discussed how companies in the emerging markets, especially India and China, are forging ahead faster and smarter than the rest of us here in the so-called rich countries.

In Discussion with Sen. Kate Lundy: The G2R crew talks with Sen. Lundy about Australia’s recent Declaration of Open Government, the AU Government 2.0 Taskforce, public sphere discussions around open government, the National Broadband Network (delivery of a fiber at 100Mbps to over 90 percent of Australians, with rural areas getting 12Mbps via wireless or satellite), and the controversy over a proposed Internet filter in Australia.

In a new public service announcement from Code for America, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Biz Stone and Flickr/Hunch founder Caterina Fake pitch Code for America’s Fellows program, which aims to recruit developers and designers for public service-oriented development projects. The spot also features CfA Executive Director Jen Pahlka, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and CfA Board member Tim O’Reilly.

In a recent post from Coder-in-Chief Clay Johnson, Clay outlines several reasons why developers should run for Congress.

The recently announced UK Government Spending Challenge, has this week, invited members of the public to send in their ideas on how to get value for public money.

The UK Spending Challenge was announced last month, but was initially only open to public servants. As Chancellor George Osbourne explained above, the response from public servants has been impressive. It has yielded over 60,000 ideas in just two weeks:

GOSCON10 (Government Open Source Conference) will be held October 27-28, 2010, at The Nines Hotel in Portland, OR. Details and conference email updates can be found at the GOSCON10 website.

Earlier this week, we announced the Code for America t-shirt contest.

Code for America now has t-shirts available featuring Gov 1.0 Hero quotes in binary form. If you donate $35, they’ll send you one as a thank you for supporting the cause.

Mitch Kapor (right) is working his, but are you?

Gov 2.0 Radio is a weekly podcast that “captures the thoughts of public and private sector leaders using Web 2.0 to make government more effective, collaborative and transparent.” The show is held every Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern Time on BlogTalkRadio.

YourGov is a free 311 iPhone app from Cartegraph that helps citizens easily forward their observations and concerns to local governments. YourGOV users can submit issues — such as such as potholes, fallen trees, vandalism, and street light outages — complete with location, unique details, and photos. Once submitted, YourGOV will automatically deliver requests to the appropriate participating government agency.

The General Services Administration has launched a re-design of USA.gov that includes easier access to mobile applications, government performance dashboards, citizen engagement contests and a simpler navigation structure. USA.gov is the U.S. government’s official information and services site. More on the new design from GSA.

We’re giving away one free ticket to next week’s Next Generation of Government Summit in Arlington, VA, hosted by GovLoop.

The Department of Health & Human Services launched Healthcare.gov, an all-in-one healthcare information site related to the Affordable Care Act dedicated to helping citizens ‘take health care into your own hands.’

Features include Find Insurance Options, Get Prevention Tips, Compare Care Quality and Understand the Law.