“We also are working with Code for America (CFA) to partner with the City on an accelerator for startups that focus on civic issues, funded by Google and the Kauffman Foundation. CFA will also provide a platform for civic hackers to maintain and adapt open source code for the city, establish a fellowship assigning three bright minds to city government for a year to solve specific problems, and create a Civic Commons Marketplace for cities to share technology and collaborate on new technologies and applications.”

- Ronald Conway: Sf.citi: Harnessing the Power of San Francisco’s Tech Community to Create Jobs and Improve the City

“Why should every city government treat the same issues as unique barriers? If one has pushed through a solution, why would we try to face the issue as a barrier? If we change our mode of thinking we are now viewing this issue simply as a process to follow. I’m not trying to simplify complex scenarios nor to undervalue thoughtful planning, but I don’t see how we can view the same problems as unique, over and over again. Take the hard work others have done before us, leverage it for our city and residents benefit, and do the same with out struggles and wins- publish our process successes and our common software solutions and share in the efficiencies and collaborations that can strengthen our governments and improve their operation.

To wit, this is exactly how I’m approaching our efforts to implement opendata in both the City of Oakland and the County of Alameda. San Francisco, New York and Chicago have done the hard work blazing a trail, now we have a great process to follow so we don’t have to do the same hard work as they did.

* Identify problem
* Search for existing solution
* Plug and play.

And I think that the more we talk about the processes and struggles to change, the more we all gain.”

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Steve Spiker: Barriers or Processes?

 Steve Spiker writes a great post about the potential to open-source our processes, not just our code.  Hear hear.

Open Architecture [i.e., The Internet Is a Human Right]:

continuations:

The Internet is not really a technology but rather a set of principles that have become embodied in a bunch of different technologies.  I am going to quote at some length from a document that Cerf also co-authored about the history of the Internet:

The Internet as we now know it embodies a key underlying technical idea, namely that of open architecture networking. In this approach, the choice of any individual network technology was not dictated by a particular network architecture but rather could be selected freely by a provider and made to interwork with the other networks through a meta-level “Internetworking Architecture”

Albert Wenger discusses how the Open Architecture of the internet contributes fundamental rights and freedoms that it offers.

When we talk about “Government as a Platform”, we’re largely drawing a parallel between the architecture of government technology (and cities, more broadly) and the architecture of the Internet.  The idea, described above, that an open architecture is not about any one technology, but rather about a set of principles that can be embodied by different technologies, is the key.  By building around an open architecture, guided by open standards, new specific technologies can be inserted, replaced, and improved as necessary, without disrupting the overall structure.  The freedom that this architecture embodies explicitly encourages innovation, by decreasing the cost of changing or improving any one component, or of adding something new on top of the system.

This all sounds a bit abstract, I’m sure, so for our part at Civic Commons, we’ll work on tying these concepts into more concrete examples.