GitHub has a great write-up of how open source community contributions played a key role in helping NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter achieve lift-off on Mars.
Philadelphia launches alpha city website
The new site, located at alpha.phila.gov, is powered by WordPress with a custom theme that hopefully the city will open source at some point in the future.
DHS report outlines challenges, opportunities of open source in government
The report emphasizes the importance of case studies to highlight open source execution within government, bringing more awareness to support and warranty options, simplify code release process and increase education around license guidance and procurement.
Doubling down on government technology
We’ve recently seen an uptick in venture capital interest around government and civic technology startups, but before we enthusiastically celebrate these investments, we must ask ourselves whether this potential bubble will truly reshape government IT or simply leave us five years from now in the same place we are today.
Got natural disasters? There’s an open source emergency preparedness toolkit for that
If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and woke up at to a 6.1 earthquake at 3:30 a.m. this morning, now would be a good time for citizens and local governments everywhere to take a look at City72 Toolkit.
GitHub and the C-suite social
Much like we pooh-poohed Twitter in those early days, GitHub, in its early crawl, is today dismissed simply as a tool for the diehard developer. However, as with any tool with great potential, innovators find new ways to leverage emerging technology to communicate, and government chief information and technology officers can effectively do this with GitHub.
New Zealand forks the United Kingdom
Perhaps the biggest civic open source story of 2013 was the government of New Zealand’s copying of the United Kingdom’s gov.uk code to begin building a new version of its own website.
Inside the new BART.gov
Bay Area Rapid Transit Web Services Manager Timothy Moore discusses the recent upgrade of its flagship website, BART.gov, including a Drupal migration, embracing agile development, encouraging third-party developers to build off its open data and APIs, and plans for the future.
White House opens huge opportunity for designers, developers to increase We the People engagement
The White House will soon open a limited beta test to developers on a new We the People Write API that allows third-party applications to submit information to official petitions.