Open Source
2012: Open innovation for government
As we turn the calendar to the new year, we'd like to take a moment to reflect on what we've done here at Civic Commons over the past year, what we've learned, and where we're planning on heading next.
It's been a busy year for us. While the Civic Commons initiative began, slowly, as an informal partnership between Code for America and OpenPlans in early 2010, we really began working in earnest last May, thanks to generous startup support from the Omidyar Network and the MacArthur Foundation.
Since then, we've accelerated our work towards our broad goal:
Categories: Open Source and Linux
RIT STEM video game challenge hackathon
This post originally appeared on the Joan Ganz Cooney Center Blog. You can follow updates from the Cooney center via facebook, and twitter.
Categories: Open Source and Linux
Open thread: An open House of Representatives?
Today, the US House of Representatives is hosting a 2-day conference about how they can be more open and transparent about what they do under the dome. They are exploring ideas and recommendations on how to create transparency
Categories: Open Source and Linux
The Supreme Court's Golan decision gives short shrift to the public domain
In a decision that favored the 1% (copyright owners) over the 99% (consumers and the public domain), the U.S. Supreme Court recently held that neither the Patent and Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution nor the First Amendment prohibits the removal of works from the public domain. Golan v. Holder, No. 10-545. Prior blog coverage of the case: certiorari granted and the 10th Circuit opinion.
Categories: Open Source and Linux
Join the M revolution
Are you a geek?
If so, driving the future of healthcare is now within your grasp.
What do you have to do?
Learn the M programming language, and teach it to others.
What’s the M programming language?
The M programming language is also known as MUMPS. Which stands for Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System.
M is a multi-user, strongly imperative language designed to
Categories: Open Source and Linux
Open collaboration: living or dying by a community
First of all, thank you. Yup, I was talking to you.
People like me tend to get the credit when things go right, and the axe when things don’t, but in the open source world it’s you who ultimately decides the fate of a project. Engineers and managers and designers work hard, this is true. None of that matters unless we have an involved community simultaneously pointing at the shiny object up in the clouds while holding our feet firmly to the ground.
Categories: Open Source and Linux
Teaching software libraries by example
These days there is a software library for nearly every occasion. Many of them are well designed and well implemented. Unfortunately, almost none of them have documentation presented in a way that allows a new user to quickly understand the basics and put it to work effectively.
Categories: Open Source and Linux
2011 People's Choice Award: And the winner is...
Thanks to everyone who voted for a People's Choice Award winner last week! Looking at the votes took some time due to a few folks who appear to have been dedicated enough to set up vote-bots. We appreciate your enthusiasm, but our authors are champs on their own, no additional help needed. But now that the votes are all in, we're pleased to announce that this year's winner is David Doria, who wrote several stories for our Education channel last year.
Categories: Open Source and Linux
Solving the common standards problem in the open data space
Last year during my Open Government Data Camp keynote speech on The State of Open Data 2011 I mentioned how I thought the central challenge for open data was shifting from getting data open (still a big issue, but a battle that is starting to be won) to getting all that open data in some common standards and schemas so that use (be it apps, analysis and other uses) can be scaled across jurisdictions.
Looks like someone out there is trying to turn that challenge in to a business opportunity.
Categories: Open Source and Linux
What's not wrong with PIPA and SOPA
Here's one list purporting to be the "10 Major Companies Which Are Supporting SOPA/PIPA" – Philip Morris, Rolex, Dolce & Gabbana, Adidas, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Ford Motor Company, Sony, Wal-Mart, World Wrestling Entertainment, Electronic Art – Notice something about them?
Categories: Open Source and Linux
Busting bureaucracy with radical management
To transform organizations so that they are fit for human beings--more inspiring and engaging and yet just as disciplined and even more productive--we need to understand why promising ideas for improving management developed in the 20th Century--such as teams, empowerment, delayering or innovation--failed to become a permanent part of the standard management repertoire.
Categories: Open Source and Linux
When metadata comes to Twitter
Chris Lehmann is the principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I love reading his education-related tweets because of his many interesting ideas, insights and observations. There's another side to Chris, though. Chris is a rabid sports fan, and he'll unleash a torrent of tweets during certain sporting events. I can appreciate his sports fervor, but to me those sports tweets are more noise rather than signal. I'd love to be able to tell Twitter, “give me all of Chris Lehmann's education-related tweets and none of his sports tweets.” (I also want Chris to continue tweeting his sports tweets, because those are an essential part of who he is.)
Categories: Open Source and Linux
Lego could have encouraged STEM education for girls--but launched the Friends line instead
There's been some outrage over the new Lego Friends line, intended to bring more girls into the addictive world of Lego building. Initially, I felt it was a fair extension of the product line. Now I'm concerned about the messages Lego is sending to our future builders and innovators--both boys and girls.
Categories: Open Source and Linux
Why SOPA and PIPA are bad for open source
The widespread internet blackout yesterday in protest at unbalanced legislation being rushed through the US Congress was dramatic and notable. I did have some questions though on why it was important to the open source community. The way the laws have been framed by their proponents makes them look as if they are all about file sharing and specifically music and video sharing. However, the problem with them is they create badly-bounded new powers that are likely to exploited in ways that fall outside the frame.
Categories: Open Source and Linux
How far should openness extend?
If you could open one of the following data sets tomorrow, which one would you open and why?
All non-classified government data
Census information
Government statistics
Geo data
Weather data
Public records
Data from publicly-funded research projects
Digitized books and media from public libraries
Selling the idea of open data seems straightforward. If taxpayers paid for it, a government should share it. But there have to be exceptions for National Security and privacy.
Categories: Open Source and Linux
Crushed innovation: When patent lawyers switch to NPEs
When well-known, richly compensated patent lawyers switch from representing world-class tech companies to servicing "non-practicing entities," something's up. Could the sordidness of a business based on bringing patent lawsuits be outweighed by large amounts of cash? At least for some, apparently yes.
Categories: Open Source and Linux
Steam rumors are flying again, but Desura beat them to open source
The Desura game client is not only available for open-source-loving players, but also now for developers. They've released the client on Github as Desurium under GPL v3.
Desura is similar to the Steam gaming platform in that they both are a way for gamers to buy downloadable copies of a lot of really great games, often for equally great prices. Desura adds the option for developers to include Desura-only functionality in their games.
Categories: Open Source and Linux
Crowdsourcing the State of the Union
Mozilla partners with public media to empower citizen engagement in U.S. election coverage
Tuesday's State of the Union Address from U.S. President Barack Obama will include something special: crowdsourced captions and subtitles provided by everyday citizens around the world.
Categories: Open Source and Linux
Who gets a seat at the table?
“That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.”
—Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table
Back in September I was lucky enough to participate in IBM's centennial THINK forum in New York City . The lineup included a staggering array of CEOs of the biggest, oldest, and most influential companies in the world, several heads of state (on loan from the General Assembly sessions at the UN across town), and a handful of boldface journalists and thought leaders. For all of the power on display in that room, the real topic of the moment was insurrection.
Categories: Open Source and Linux
Can Apple change education?
On January 19, Apple held a large, education-related event on in New York City. Just as with almost any other Apple event, pre-event speculations were all over the place. It was clear that the announcement was going to target the textbook market, but what wasn't clear was its scope. As AllThingsD's Peter Kafka wrote: "the key thing to watch at the Guggenheim is whether Cue brings up reps from the big textbook publishers like Pearson and McGraw-Hill onstage, or whether the focus is on letting educators and others build their own books, so they can bypass both the publishers and the antiquated textbook procurement system."
Categories: Open Source and Linux
