Category Archives: open source

Jennifer Pahlka: Do more than leave or speak up. Make open government work better.

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In the face of existential challenges that test the national character of the United States of America, including long wars abroad and high unemployment at home, citizens may be tempted to tune out or voice their displeasure. With the growth of the open government movement, people now have another option: take the future of government into their own hands and try to make it work better. Today, Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America, highlighted why she believes the time for that choice has come. (If you’re following the open government movement, you’ve likely come across the work of Code for America, whose fellows have been trying to help cities work better across the country.)

…in the past twenty years, a solid chunk of American society has subscribed to the notion that the Internet was the new frontier, and a limitless one at that, and so the disgruntled could simply draw their own map, create their own circles, and be done with it. And it’s the Millennials who have brought us back down to earth and reminded us that the lesson of the Internet is that shared endeavor has value, that pooling resources is a good idea, and that government is the way we do things together that we can’t do individually. Which is why Millennials are the most pro-government generation in decades, however disgusted they would be by the debt ceiling brinksmanship, if they looked up from their laptops and smart phones long enough to notice. They are tapping into another innately American tradition, one of fundamental optimism, invention, and practicality. They’ve never met a system they couldn’t participate in, hack, mash-up, add value to or improve. And government is already meeting their expectations, providing data, enabling the creation of apps, and slowly adopting the tools of the Internet to make it easier for us to do the important work of governing ourselves together. – Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, “Exit or Voice? How About Neither?“

For more on this front, watch Pahlka’s talk from the Future of Web Apps Conference, where she makes the case that civic startups are the next disruption.

Jennifer Pahlka – The Next Disruption: Government from Code for America on Vimeo.

NASA launches new open government site with open source tools

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In one of the first posts on NASA’s newly relaunched open government blog, open government analyst Ali Llewellyn writes more about why adopting open government is important now, with a nod to Tim O’Reilly’s essay on “government as a platform.”

…OpenGov is not just data transparency or technology use. “Open government is an innovative strategy for changing how government works,” Beth Noveck, the original director of the White House Open Government Initiative, explains. “By using network technology to connect the public to government and to one another informed by open data, an open government asks for help with solving problems. The end result is more effective institutions and more robust democracy.”

From the beginning, democracy was supposed to be participatory. Thomas Jefferson noted in a letter how he envisioned a government where “every man…feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day.”

In the service of that vision, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration continues to extend its journey into the open government stratosphere with the launch of a redesigned open.nasa.gov. The new site complements nasa.gov/open – but doesn’t replace it. (The /open sites that exist on federal .gov websites are a direct result of the Open Goverment Directive issued by the White House Office of Management and Budget in 2009.)

The new NASA open government is a beautiful departure from standard NASA websites. In fact, it’s a lovely move away from the Web design citizens encounter at most of the thousands of federal .gov sites. In part, that’s because the new NASA open government site is built upon General Service Agency-approved technologies and the same open source platforms ( like WordPress) that you’ll find at top-notch blogs like BoingBoing. (Or Govfresh). All due credit to Nick Skytland, Chris Gerty and Sean Herron for their hard work coding and designing the site as well. Skytland, who now heads up open government at NASA, wrote in to share his vision for the site and make a request:

After months of development and many discussions, we are very excited to announce the official public launch of open.nasa.gov. The site is a collaborative platform for the open government community at NASA to share success stories and projects related OpenGov from around the agency. The content on this site is written by NASA employees and contractors (just the core OpenGov team right now). We will be highlighting the ways that transparency, participation, and collaboration are being embraced by NASA policy, technology, and culture, and the future that becomes possible because of that commitment. We would love your feedback on the site. Please let us know if you have any issues with the site so we can fix them. The site works on most browsers, but we are still working out issues with Internet Explorer.”

Aside from WordPress, the technology behind open.nasa.gov includes:
Techs used:

  • A WordPress theme by Landau Reece called Protean 1.0
  • MySQL
  • Apache
  • The Disqus commenting system
  • The UserVoice feedback collection tool

As I reported yesterday, NASA’s open government story now includes supplying the innovation behind OpenStack and Nebula. That said, while the technology behind the new NASA open government site and other initiatives is important to recognize, it has to be valued in terms of its ability to both host conversations and feature the people behind it. As NASA’s open government story evolves, cultural changes will be important to track, along with any technical milestones driven by open source or efficiencies driven by tightening budgets.

A note on FOIA

One of the interesting decisions that British Columbia’s government made in its adoption of open government was its decision to separate good government data, associated with transparency and accountability, from open government data, associated with innovation and co-creation.

NASA’s open government site makes no such distinction, with the link to Freedom of Information Act requests buried down at the bottom of the open data page. NASA’s open government plan includes aspirational goals of further reducing its FOIA backlog and creating a “single, Web-based system for handling all FOIA requests across the 13 NASA locations.” If the agency can do as well with that system as it has with the design, communication and coding embodied this new site, its open government team will be able to celebrate more good government achievement alongside its explorations into citizen science, random hacks of kindness, education and open data.

“Let’s honor Alan Turing not with a code of conduct, but with our code”

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This morning, John Graham-Cumming delivered a stirring keynote at the Open Source Conference (OSCON) in Portland, Oregon. He challenged the open source community to honor computing pioneer Alan Turing not simply with a code of conduct but with the software they build. The five minute video is well worth your time.

Graham-Cumming also shared the story of how he leveraged the power of social media, open source software and the Internet to honor his petition to apologize for the treatment of Turing. For those who follow the path of e-democracy, this is fascinating stuff:

In 2009, I petitioned the UK to government to apologize for the treatment of Alan Turing. To my surprise over 32,000 people in the UK signed the petition and on September 10 of that year then Prime Minister Gordon Brown called me at home to tell me that the apology text was being issued that night.

I harnessed this great crowd of ordinary people and celebrities by myself. Using a mixture of Twitter and Facebook and old fashioned press and television the word spread quickly. I have written about how I achieved this on O’Reilly Radar. The campaign grew slowly at first as only a small number of people in the computer world, who already knew about the Turing story, signed. But a big break came when The Independent newspaper wrote about the campaign and shortly after Richard Dawkins lent his name. As Twitter amplified stories in the press more and more people signed until the BBC decided to cover the story first on its web siteand then on television.

With the weighty BBC story to tweet the petition quickly grew and got the attention of Downing Street. The petition itself was all managed electronically through open source software created by the British non-profit My Society. With an open source petition platform the British government has enabled direct, electronic democracy.

Open government innovation from NASA fuels launch of OpenStack and Nebula

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Earlier today, a new startup emerged from stealth at OSCON in Portland, Oregon. Nebula looks to democratize cloud computing with open source hardware.

Nebula appliance As Venturebeat reported, by combining OpenStack with Facebook’s OpenCompute project, Nebula could bring cloud computing to everyone with a cloud appliance.

It’s going to be a while before we’ll know if this bold vision comes to pass, but it’s important to be clear: this private sector innovation and startup is the outgrowth of one of NASA’s open government initiatives, where a technology developed by the government was released to the public to innovate upon.

That outcome can be at least partially attributed to Nebula CEO Chris Kemp, the former NASA CTO for IT, built a cloud “dream team” for Nebula’s launch from Kleiner Perkins’ basement. Nebula has the potential to bring cheaper private clouds to enterprises and small to medium-sized business to government, which could stand to leapfrog a generation of technology. (Putting a cloud behind an organization’s firewall could also address the security and compliance challenges that have hampered adoption of public cloud by enterprise and government users.) You can watch the announcement of Nebula at OSCON in the video below:

I talked with Kemp yesterday about OpenStack, his new startup, enterprise IT and innovation in government. “I am just unbelievably excited about all of the innovation that’s going to happen, he said. “When I left NASA, there was an open playing field. Citrix has bet their company on a tech that emerged out of NASA. Rackspace has incorporated it as well. Dell and HP are working with OpenStack too.”

Kemp, at least for now, doesn’t appear to be looking towards acquisition as his exit strategy. “We’re building a whole new company,” he said. “It’s not going to acquired by Dell or another large vendor. It’s too important to be lost in a big organization. The opportunity here is to build a lasting company that plays a key role in how computing unfolds.”

It’s the potential to change the world that seems to have brought a glint to Kemp’s eye. “This is why I left NASA,” he said. “I had this idea, this concept, I knew it had the potential to change the world, I knew it was time to build that. There are things you can only do inside of government, and there are things you can only do outside of government.”

In at least one sense, this outcome is about Gov 2.0 versus the beast of bureaucracy, once again. “The thing I learned at NASA is the biggest barrier to this stuff is the culture within the organization,” said Kemp. “It’s people. In a federal agency, people have been there forever and have spent tons of money on tools. What we’re doing with this appliance will disrupt a lot of that.”

Kemp also offered a suggestion to government agencies with innovators trying to make a difference. “The real shame is that you take the most risk-averse people in the world – government civil servants – and make them take the most dangerous leap, to end their careers, to be entrepreneurs. Imagine if government allowed people to take one year without pay, try to create something, and then return to public service.”

While that may be an unlikely dream, Kemp has left government himself, jumping to an endeavour that has the potential to disrupt the future of computing. “We want people to build on a platform that isn’t unnecessarily expensive or reliable,” he said. “We’re selling a little box that creates an infrastructure service and supporting it. You plug it in at the top of the rack where basically joins ‘the collective.’ It becomes part of a massive compute and storage cloud that’s compatible with Amazon and allows anyone to use a cloud that based on standards.
And they can do it with the cheapest hardware.”

Open source has been a key component of NASA’s open government work. Now one of its open source projects may become part of the work of many other people in industries unrelated to aerospace. With the launch of Nebula, an open government initiative looks set to create significant value — and jobs — in the private sector, along with driving open innovation in information technology.

OpenCongress 3.0 empowers citizens to contact their legislators

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Over the past 48 hours, the volume of citizens trying to contact Congress regarding the debt ceiling and budget debate has overwhelmed Congressional websites and Capital Hill switchboards. Citizens that want to reach their member(s) of Congress now have a powerful upgrade to one of the best options online: an improved version of Open Congress.

The upgrade of OpenCongress follows the launch of OpenGovernment.org in January, which is a free, open source online portal designed to make open state government available to citizens.

The new version of OpenCongress, which will launch this afternoon, puts new engagement features at the center of the site experience, writes in executive director David Moore via email. “It’s the culmination of more than six months of development, and the release is composed of two major new feature sets, Contact-Congress & MyOC Groups. One of the primary unique value propositions here is the ability to write all three of your members of the U.S. Congress at once, from one page, with our handy Message Builder, incorporating bill info & campaign contribution data and more, set it to public or private, and then send it *immediately* over email to official Congressional webforms. No other website offers this service in a web app that’s free, libre, open-source, and not-for-profit. As always, OCv3 is built by PPF with primary support from the Sunlight Foundation.”

Moore explained more:

“Clearly, with the debt ceiling debate and accompanying crashing and burning of Congressional communication channels, there’s a huge public demand for this service. OpenCongress is releasing it as a public service, free & open to everyone to be able to track & share their correspondence with federal legislators in a transparent public forum. MyOC Groups will complement Contact-Congress on OpenCongress by enabling greater self-organizing communities around bills and issues, as we’ve seen with unemployment extensions and other hot issues on our public comment forums and wiki.

We think it will be a popular new tool for government accountability, fighting systemic corruption, and facilitating a more deliberative democracy. And this is just the start, we hope, of a truly robust open API for constituent communication … but first, we need to give the public some user-friendly tools for sending compelling emails to their members of Congress, and then organizing their communities around them for greater effect.”

Moore told me that he expects the same features to be available on OpenGovernment.org as soon as the resources are available. Both OpenCongress and OpenGovernment are built using Ruby on Rails, so each will work well with the features. That message came with a hint: Moore is hoping today’s launch wil attract additional non-profit funding and support for more open-source development time to bring the OCv3 feature to OpenGovernment.

Moore also added that the Contact-Congress feature on OpenCongress is powered by open-
source software, the Formaggedon Rails plugin, which can be remixed &
applied to other websites & entities. More information on Formaggedon at the moment is available on today’s blog post on OpenCongress 3.0.

“Formaggedon will first be integrated with OpenGovernment,” writes Moore, which would make the site the only “free and open-source site that enables direct emailing of both your
state legislators, in upper & lower chambers. And subsequently we’ll bring over MyOG Groups.”

Britain seeks alpha

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In the United States, government agencies like the FCC have launched open government websites in beta. In the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom is rolling back one more version and seeking alpha.

Alpha.gov 404 error page

Alpha.gov.uk is an experimental prototype of a new, single website for government in the United Kingdom that the Government Digital Service developed over the course of three months, working from the recommendations of Martha Lane-Fox’s Review. That service is located within the UK Cabinet Office. As its designers emphasize, “the site is a demonstration, and whilst it’s public it’s not permanent and is not replacing any other website.” (The hilarious 404 graphic above was designed by Matt Blease.)

There are some interesting semantics to consider here. In software development, “alpha” refers to the initial release in a software development cycle. In machine learning, alpha is “the degree to which a learning agent takes into account new information.”

In either sense, a government seeking alpha in rebooting its online presence is both taking risks and revisiting what government websites should do in the 21st century. The trial of Alpha.gov.uk offers a toolkit of simple, reusable functions that are oriented around the most common needs that citizens go online to address, like lost passports.

To date, the British plan to reinvent websites has received good press, including an excellent post what Alpha.gov gets right. One notable choice in age of austere budgets: going with an open source platform and using next generation web development tools and languages, including a mix of Ruby and Python. Says Wired UK:

This isn’t the first time that the government has experimented with creating a single site for all departments. From URL directories to public service hubs, sites like direct.gov.uk have often tried to shove the whole shebang into one, hulking site with varying degrees of success.

But Alpha.gov.uk’s daring design, 21st century architecture and expansive ambitions (the content can be easily syndicated to new internet platforms, like apps or IPTV),  could be the way forward.

The Alpha.gov team continues to share more about how Alpha.gov was developed at the project blog, encouraging citizens to play with the prototype and send feedback to Get Satisfaction or to @AlphaGov on Twitter or Facebook.

[Image Credit for Alpha.gov Error Page designed by Matt Blease: Ben Terrett]

Gov 2.0 gets applied in Oklahoma [#Gov20a]

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In the Gov 2.0a conference going on today and tomorrow in Oklahoma, the “a” stands for “applied,” as in implementing technology, processes and people strategy to make government work better. There should be some video going up later, along with pictures from Adriel Hampton and a blog post or three from from the attendees. Until that goes online, the tweetstream has told the best tale of what’s been happening at the conference. I used Storify to chronicle the story online.

http://storify.com/digiphile/gov20a-gov-20-goes-to-oklahoma.js[View the story “Gov20a: Gov 2.0 Goes to Oklahoma” on Storify]

WhiteHouse.gov puts data to use in its new federal property map.

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As I reported at the O’Reilly Radar, The White House used interactive mapping and open data illustrate excess federal property around the United States. Check out the White House excess property map to see what that means in practice. I’ve embedded a similar map from MapBox below.

Selling excess federal property will be challenging. In contrast, open source mapping tools are making storytelling with data easier – and cheaper.

Open Government Camp: Sunlight’s tools for transparency

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So this one time, at Transparency Camp…

I’m still thinking through all of the things I learned at the Sunlight Foundation’s annual unconference last weekend. My top level takeaway was the large number of international campers solidified that transparency has gone global. At an operational level, I thought that the Sunlight Foundation used the combination of Internet and mobile technology to organize better than any of the previous unconferences I’ve attended. They raised the bar for interactivity with a new mobile app, integrated displays and livestreaming.

Putting the tools together to bring off a big camp is a lot harder than listing them, but by sharing the tools for transparency that the organizers used, Scott Stadum did the open government community a mitzvah. While that mobile app required development time and expertise, the vast majority of these tools are free on the Web.

Here’s a quick rundown of the tools that were used during Transparency Camp 2011:

Great stuff.

Stadum did forget one tool, even as he used it: the Sunlight Foundation’s blog.

From where I sit, a well designed and maintained blog continues to be extremely useful as the hub for organizing, particularly in a Web application ecosystem that supports the kind of diversity in platforms listed above. Sunlight does a great job with that, and in using it as a platform to track news that matter, like open government data.

Thanks again to the organizers, sponsors, hosts and, most of all, the attendees of Transparency Camp, who taught me a lot about open government over the course of two days.

Kicking off Transparency Camp 2011 with 3 words [#tcamp11]

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Today in Washington, Transparency Camp is back in session. As with every unconference, each attendee introduced him or herself with three words that describes what they do, what they care about or what they work on. The frequency of those words is shown in the Transparency Camp 2011 wordle below.

Transparency Camp 2011 Wordle

Transparency Camp 2011 Wordle

You can follow the conversation on Twitter on the #tcamp11 hashtag:

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Some sessions will be livestreamed at TransparencyCamp.com. Sessions will be updated on a new mobile website at m.tcamp.us. Check back for a report from Transparency Camp 2011 tomorrow.