The Obama Administration's Open Government Directive ordered Federal agencies to produce open government plans by April 7th, and while some advocates are disappointed, we have before us a bewildering number of initiatives to improve transparency, collaboration, and participation across the Government. It will not surprise you to learn that I spent some time looking for places … Continue reading Open Source headlines from the Open Government plans
Category: What I’m Thinking About
Big and small things I’m working on.
Open source matters to open government. Really.
"Open source and open government are not the same," I've been reading recently. When discussing the role of open standards in open government transparency projects, Bob Caudill at Adobe, is concerned that open source and open standards are being conflated. He likes open standards just fine, but: "Open standards are driving for interoperability between systems … Continue reading Open source matters to open government. Really.
Goodbye Google Reader
So I finally decided that Google had more than enough information about what I liked and disliked, that the laggy Google Reader interface was much more trouble than it's worth, and Google Reader meant a separate and completely unnecessary inbox, which was playing havoc with my workflow. So instead of going for a specialized RSS … Continue reading Goodbye Google Reader
Failing Faster: Lessons from the Open Source Community
[I first presented this at the GTC Southwest conference in Austin on February 13, 2010.] Hundreds of thousands of open source software projects are capturing an unprecedented amount of innovation and effort from contributors around the world. These projects vary in quality, but represent, in the aggregate, one the largest collective efforts in the history … Continue reading Failing Faster: Lessons from the Open Source Community
What the Open Government Directive Means for Open Source
On the heels of the Open Government Memo of January 21st, 2009, the Obama Administration has issued the Open Government Directive. The Directive tells agencies what they must do to meet the expectations set by the Memo. The directive names many deadlines for agency compliance, most of them around reducing FOIA backlogs and increasing the … Continue reading What the Open Government Directive Means for Open Source
My Toast at Chris and Carolyn’s Wedding
This weekend, I was lucky enough to be the best man at my friend Chris' wedding. It's the first time I've actually been part of a wedding party. The scariest part, for me, was the toast at the rehearsal dinner. It wasn't the presentation that had me worried, it was the content. I wasn't sure … Continue reading My Toast at Chris and Carolyn’s Wedding
US Courts: Open Source Will Make You Break the Law
Most of you already know about the US Courts' shameful profiteering through the PACER system. They charge $0.08/page for public court documents and in so doing stifle the public's access to their own content. Not long ago, our friends at CITP released an open source project called RECAP. When you install this gem in your … Continue reading US Courts: Open Source Will Make You Break the Law
My OSCON 2009 Talk on Open Source in Government
The good people at O'Reilly have posted my Open Source in Government talk at OSCON 2009 on blip.tv. It's also on YouTube. I'll admit to cringing a bit when I started watching, but I'm pretty happy with how it all went. Here are the slides. In the panel afterward, someone asked my why open source … Continue reading My OSCON 2009 Talk on Open Source in Government
The NSA’s Security Challenge
Using open source software, the National Security Agency was able to gather a community of professional and amateur security experts together to make unprecedented security protections available to public. The National Security Agency has a mission. It is not just the nation's code keeper and code breaker, but it must ensure the security of the … Continue reading The NSA’s Security Challenge
Tilt-Shift: Leave it to the experts.
I first ran into this tilt-shift effect in Harper's Magazine a few years ago. You make a regular photograph look like a photo of small things taken by a macro lens. This is done by messing with the "focus" of the photo. Done right, the subject looks like an impossibly elaborate model. I like that … Continue reading Tilt-Shift: Leave it to the experts.
a technology job is no excuse 