Open Source Digital Voting Foundation’s John Sebes writes about watching new citizens complete voter registration application forms and the associated usability issues, especially for older, less tech-savvy demographic.
I’ve been collecting links (below) from the UK’s Government Digital Service blog for a while wondering when they’ll stop executing their great “beta” work on GOV.UK, but they continue to outdo themselves.
We’ve heard a lot about Drupal and WordPress in government, but not much about the open source platform Joomla. We asked Joomla External Communications Lead Sandra Ordonez to share how government is using it, its key features, how it compares to Drupal and WordPress and what governments are using it.
In January 2011, Michael McDonald and Micah Altman founded the Public Mapping Project and began building the open source platform DistrictBuilder to give citizens more of a say in the redistricting process.
After watching the documentary Hacking Democracy, I started researching how government uses voting technology to conduct elections. That’s how I learned about the work of Open Source Digital Voting Foundation.
As I mentioned in my 2012 civic commitment post, I’m focused on helping drastically lower the cost, de-mystify the technology and build better websites for local government.
Hacking Democracy, released in 2007, documents the improprieties and lack of security around proprietary voting software vendor Diebold Elections Systems.
Civic Commons Director Nick Grossman and 2011 Code for America Fellow Jeremy Canfield give an overview of the new Civic Commons Marketplace, a repository and apps showcase for open source civic and government development projects.
San Francisco Director of Innovation Jay Nath’s TEDxSoMa talk from earlier this year:
Every day, tech-minded citizens across the country are doing good by their communities, literally geeking out about how they can help re-define the relationship government has with its citizens, using technology as a democratic tool to empower both.
Memphis announced it will develop its new website using the open source platform Drupal and OpenPublic. Mediacurrent, Linx Consulting and Phase2 Technology will collaborate on the project.
The British government’s Cabinet Office has published an Open Source Procurement Toolkit as part of its ongoing information and communications strategy.
Code for America has published videos of CfA Fellows demoing their apps during the Code for America Summit held October 13-14 in San Francisco.
O’Reilly Media’s Alex Howard interviewed San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee this week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Lee discusses open source, open data, apps, mobile and bridging the digital divide.
The next iteration of Georgia.gov will be built using the open source platform Drupal.
The civic hackathon – a gathering (either virtual or physical) of technologists for a few days or weeks to build civic-themed software – remains one of the more durable manifestations of the open government movement.
In a new blog post, Gartner’s Andrea Di Maio asks if it’s time to pull the plug on government Websites?
Firmstep has launched a new service called AchieveCity, a Web-based government platform powered by the Drupal distribution OpenPublic (developed by Phase2 Technology) and hosted in the Amazon EC2 environment.
Federal government open source and open government practitioners will convene for a one-day conference, OpenGovDC, June 14 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, DC.
Voter ID and Civic Innovation
Since 2008, there has been a wave of voting law changes that impose barriers to the ballot box. Georgia Rep. John Lewis, a veteran of “Bloody Sunday,” called the new laws “the most concerted effort to restrict the right to vote since before the Voting Rights Act.” The right to vote is being chiseled away [...]