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Introducing government.github.com
- aroman 13y agoGreat to see Philadelphia front and center with this project. In Mayor Nutter's keynote at PennApps last month, he talked a lot about how Philly is really pushing for open data/open government. It's great to see those initiatives coming to fruition.
- jrubinovitz 13y agoPhiladelphia is a great city for open data/open government. There's a Chief Data Officer and a pretty active Code for America brigade.
- jarvuschris 13y agoPhilly hacks every week! http://codeforphilly.org/ http://codeforphilly.org/
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- bfirsh 13y agoSeems pretty US-centric. Governments outside the US are doing great things with open source too. The entire UK government website is open source, for example: https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov
- briandoll 13y agoThey are! You can see them listed on the homepage as well as the community page, which lists organizations by country: http://government.github.com/community/ http://government.github.com/community/ If you see any that are missing, please do open a pull request: https://github.com/github/government.github.com https://github.com/github/government.github.com
- bfirsh 13y agoAh - missed that page. My bad.
- pessimizer 13y agoWhat's US-centric about it? I don't see a reference to anywhere but Canada.
- stevewilber 13y agoThis is really cool. I sent a request to my City to join. I'd be happy to donate some time improving their website if the source were public.
- bachback 13y agoamazing potential. but in the end - out of scope. If you go through the least each org has only few repos with little interest. One of the more interesting ones is: https://github.com/opengovplatform https://github.com/opengovplatform
- cleverjake 13y agoout of scope because they haven't done anything yet? Perhaps the issue is visibility and mindshare to do something civic, in which case, this would help - no?
- bachback 13y agoRead Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks By Nick Szabo and couple that with Bitcoin. Think of laws as being online documents with their own git layer, public repo infrastructure. "We are now entering an era of online communications and software "literacy". The "physics of cyberspace", studied by computer scientists, are radically different from the properties of paper, to an even greater degree than paper was different from string, clay, and metal. "
- fintler 13y agoMany of these organizations may be testing the response they get from creating a Github account. This project is a way they can receive feedback instead of dying in obscurity. It's a chicken and egg problem. Edit: Longer explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6556181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6556181
- estel 13y agoHow about GDS? https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov
- robbfitzsimmons 13y agoAdmitting it's totally beside the point, what is the deal with the "trademark" Campfire emoji at the end of the post? Soon(tm)? In-joke?
- lost-theory 13y agohttp://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/23112/where-did-soon-originate http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/23112/where-did-so...
- clienthunter 13y agoI saw a TED talk about using GH as a form of collaborative democracy once. I am so shocked (in the best way) that momentum is building this quickly.
- briandoll 13y agoLoved that talk! It was Clay Shirky "How the Internet will (one day) transform government" http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government.html http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_o...
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- sliverstorm 13y agoI figure what's happening is the governments around the world have started picking up people who are excited about open source and GitHub, as those people grow old enough to work in government. It wasn't long ago that GitHub was (in my eyes) mostly popular with early-twenties and younger, a demographic that doesn't usually work in government! But they grow older, some get hired in government, and they bring their enthusiasm with them.
- konklone 13y agoAnd there are some exceptions! The CFPB, in particular, has a number of extremely talented young people doing awesome work and in-house development for them -- and they open source a great deal of work: https://github.com/cfpb https://github.com/cfpb
- pizza 13y agoAnd so, github claims this space.
- yeukhon 13y agoBefore we go on, please have someone fix this bug. We are making a lot of suggestion, but no WhiteHouse developers are interested in this. This is not how you do an open source project. https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour/issues/3 https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour/issues/3
- d23 13y agoMaybe if you weren't trolling the github issues section relevant issues could be worked on.
- yeukhon 13y agoYou should tell everyone on that issue. And caring about your government is not trolling. It's funny to see those suggestions, but they carry a freakin' point.
- gknoy 13y agoI think he means that the people working on the Github repo have very likely nearly zero capability to do anything about the government shutdown, therefore it's the Wrong Place to Complain. It's not helpful for that project. (It was, however, funny and well-written. :)) Some people deliberately use repos, issues, etc for tracking things like that in their own life, but in general it's pretty discourteous to the developers who maintain a repo about one thing (a theme for the WH site?) if you are complaining about things outside their locus of control. You wouldn't complain to your congressperson if the White House website is broken, so complaining on the issues page of the White House web theme repo should similarly avoided. Call your congressman. Write letters to the president. Petition on the Whitehouse homepage. Those are all more constructive ways of complaining. Venting on someone else's repo seems rude, though.
- yeukhon 13y agoI think at this point they know we are all angry at their inability to reboot government. I brought this up because if you were to open source government websites and IT projects, it is also doable to create an issue tracker fills with questions and issues for congressmen, no? We have issue tracker with issue labels. A cognressman can probably create an issue tracker like that! And update CHANGELOG.md periodically to show progress! By the way, I wouldn't contribute to government repos myself because from my observations no one takes other people's pull request or the repo just die.
- guynamedloren 13y agoThis is awesome. I respect GitHub more and more every day. However, despite how much I love the GitHub model and think it's a great way to collaborate, it's still (mostly) inaccessible for non-developers. Shameless plug: I think there is still some room for innovation here, so I'm building a GitHub for everyone else: http://madebyloren.com/github-for-writers http://madebyloren.com/github-for-writers
- dynamic99 13y agoAs a developer myself, I know it's hard to put a timetable on these kinds of things. That said, do you have a vague idea of when this is going to be released? I'm on a Debate team, and this would be an awesome tool to collaborate on cases. I would use Github for it, but my team is not too tech savvy. Oh, and is this going to be open source? I'd love to help out with this project.
- eric_cc 13y agoSimply branching, making edits and PR's is not that difficult. You should consider trying Github for your use-case before you totally dismiss it. It's not as if the command-line tool is required.
- TeMPOraL 13y agoThe on-site editor on GitHub was a really great addition of recent.
- glomph 13y agoMight want to look at https://www.authorea.com/ https://www.authorea.com/ as well.
- guynamedloren 13y agoOpen alpha up right now [1]. I'm not pushing it too hard because there are still some usability issues and bugs to work out, but its getting there. [1] http://penflip.com http://penflip.com
- cheshire137 13y agoWoo, just submitted a pull request to get openlexington of Lexington, KY on there.
- Siecje 13y agoHere is the Changlelog episode of Civic Hacking http://5by5.tv/changelog/95 http://5by5.tv/changelog/95
- Joe_Quincy 13y agoI wish github would work on some features that help developers write better code rather then this, which looks like it was put together by some intern.
- mangoman 13y agoGithub is a lot bigger than just helping developers now. Rendering CAD files, Visualizing CLU maps. Github isn't working just on improving the developer experience. They're working on improving the entire collaborative process. I love that now they're helping even government be collaborative. Just because its not focused on code doesn't mean you can dismiss it as "some intern" project.
- gjtorikian 13y agoHere is a list of free programming books on GitHub: https://github.com/vhf/free-programming-books https://github.com/vhf/free-programming-books I hope it will help you and other developers write better code.
- yapcguy 13y agoYeah, this is just marketing. Like when they got all excited that the Linux kernel was being hosted at Github. It was just a mirror that Torvalds set up. Github is/was being used as dumb storage.
- count 13y agoHow are all those civilian agencies using GitHub without a FISMA or FedRAMP approval (or does GitHub have one and just not advertise it)? I see at least NASA on there (who just got in trouble with their IG for improper use of un-accredited cloud services). Or does this include GitHub Enterprise users?
- mpyne 13y agoAs far as I can tell the FISMA certification is done by the agency itself, in accordance with the guidelines laid out by NIST and OMB directives. As long as the confidentiality, integrity and availability requirements are all "low" I don't see why the agency CIO couldn't simply deem GitHub as an acceptable information system for the purposes of posting files that are already cleared for unlimited public release.
- niels_olson 13y agoThanks for that. Ironically, I'm trying to collaborate with some folks, I'm DoD, and can't access the github site. And now, with the shutdown, I can't access NIST either (they are apparently closed for business except for a couple critical roles).
- sailfast 13y agoI'd recommend reaching out to @BenBalter to talk through using this for DoD. As for FISMA and compliance I believe GitHub has a government-ready ToS that could be applied - but you'd probably want to get an official go-ahead to use it to host code, and I'd still think hard about using GitHub vs. a git service behind the firewall depending on what you're building.
- count 13y agoArchive.org had much of the NIST content mirrored, if you just need specific pub references/etc. (and not trying to work with the people specifically). Getting GitHub for DoD would be great...
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- pouzy 13y agoThis is a pretty ironic timing considering the fact that there's no government in the US for now :)
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- kylemaxwell 13y agoThat's a fairly imprecise and inaccurate statement. Lots of governments in the US are still functioning (i.e. state and local), many of which are represented there. And even then, the administration is only partly shut down at the moment, even if it IS a pretty big part. We've not actually descended into anarchy here at the moment.
- eruditely 13y agothis implies that the world delves into anarchy without government, and no I'm not an anarcho anything
- riggins 13y agowhat I immediately thought is what a contrast. On one hand we have technologists at github who believe the government can and should be improved ... and are doing something about it. On the other hand we have pessimists who are so anti-government they'll enthusiastically shutdown the government.
- niels_olson 13y agoI'm on a DoD network and can't even access github.
- bitwize 13y agoNow can we use it to collaboratively fix Healthcare.gov?
- STRML 13y agoI have a good chunk of the frontend up at https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace. As for the APIs, we will never see that code - Healthcare.gov reuses a large number of critical government systems that will likely stay closed forever or are paid vendor systems, like Oracle Access Manager.
- Kinnard 13y agoDoes this mean we know longer need Congress because we can legislate through version control? Cuz that would be awesome.
- agumonkey 13y agoFunny a while ago a friend suggested we should version law texts and publish it, this is even better.
- AstroChimpHam 13y agoSo... github wants to be wikileaks?
- bachback 13y agoBitcoin + contracts => new governments https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts Quote from Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks By Nick Szabo. "We are now entering an era of online communications and software "literacy". The "physics of cyberspace", studied by computer scientists, are radically different from the properties of paper, to an even greater degree than paper was different from string, clay, and metal. "