A few days ago, Tom Steinberg—the founder and former director of mySociety—wrote a fascinating piece on power that was meant for people developing civic technology. In a post on Medium, Tom clearly describes the nature of power as it relates to technology and implored civic technologists to think more directly about how shifts in power … Read more
People who work in digital technologies don’t tend to talk a lot about power, except perhaps in relation to our ever-depleting smartphones. But if your goal in deploying modern technologies is even partly to make the world a better place, rather than solely increase the size of your Exit, sooner or later you’ll need to … Read more
Our next Patchwork hack night will be on December 10, and will be co-hosted with our friends at The Cube in Athens, Greece. Please join us! GitHubbers @petros, @fernandez, @justinmccormick, @sanicki, @stevecat, and @jdennes, as well as local community mentors, will be on hand to walk you through the Hello World tutorial, answer your questions, … Read more
The European Commission has adopted an ambitious new Circular Economy Package to help European businesses and consumers to make the transition to a stronger and more circular economy where resources are used in a more sustainable way. The proposed actions will contribute to “closing the loop” of product lifecycles through greater recycling and re-use, and … Read more
2015 was a year of progress for government transparency — however, there’s still much work to be done. As 2015 winds to a close, we can look back on a year of success stories and failures when it comes to transparency in government. At the start of the year, the federal government began releasing its … Read more
OGP is much more than Action Plans, Commitments, Policies and Best Practices. OGP is a powerful network of motivated people with a common goal, to drive a revolution around the world to make governments more open, accountable and responsive to citizens. As the case of my country Greece shows, this common goal is of even … Read more
There are around 60 million streetlights in Europe and most of them have been lighting up the roads for at least 25 years. These lights are usually not energy efficient, which accounts for between 20% and 50% of local government energy bills. In this context, the Humble Lamppost, a subgroup of the Integrated Infrastructures & … Read more
I work with IT teams that are so passionate about Red Hat’s open source mission that they bring a “default to open source” mentality to every project we work on. We’ve been quite successful in finding open source solutions for many of our business needs. Naturally, we turn to our own open source solutions for … Read more
In honor of the 2015 Open Government Partnership Summit, we are happy to release the newest draft of the Declaration on Political Finance Openness as part of the Money, Politics and Transparency project (MPT). MPT is a joint initiative between the Sunlight Foundation, Global Integrity and the Electoral Integrity Project, created to foster a network … Read more
This project was a collaboration between 18F and the U.S. Digital Service. The team was lead by Mollie Ruskin (USDS) and Julia Elman (18F) and made up of designers and developers in both groups, including Maya Benari (18F), Carolyn Dew (18F), Victor Garcia (USDS), Angel Kittiyachavalit (USDS), Colin MacArthur (18F), and Marco Segreto (18F). Meet … Read more
