open source

Last week, President Obama's administration released the Open Government Directive, or OGD, directing all federal government agencies to publish information online in an open format that can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed, and searched by commonly used web search applications. The Open Government Directive outlines these three core values:

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Just about a month ago I returned from the NTEN NTC in San Francisco where I had the opportunity to talk with Peggy Duvette, Angus Parker of WiserEarth and Leif Utne of Zanby and organizing force behind Open Wiser. I then blogged about the OpenWiser fundraising drive to raise $10,000 to build an open API to WiserEarth's database of information about organizations around the world working towards a more sustainable civilization.

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California voters recently resoundingly rejected budget measures that would have eased, but not solved, a disastrous budget deficit. As a result, services across the board from welfare to schools face significant cuts as administrators try to close massive budget gaps. Declining state tax revenues aren't helping, either. The result is going to be a multi-year fiscal catastrophe.

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Vancouver is thinking open. A council meeting agenda calls for discussing "open data, open standards and open source software for all of its data and information resources," according to the ReadWriteWeb post linked above. The benefits of governments going open are immense and arguably fulfill the role of government in serving its people. Indeed, Open Source is, by its very nature, a form of digital democracy.

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I like many others was completely blown away by Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest. The last 3rd of the book is a compendium of non profit and non governmental organizations around the world that are working on social justice, human rights, sustainability, environmental and indigenous people's issues as well as many others. Hawken's describes these groups collectively as a movement, the largest movement in the history of the world. A movement that is decentralized and global.

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Ok, actually, it's the New York Times which has developed an "API" for the U.S. Congress. Basically, the Times has munged together a bunch of data sources (see below) and developed an "API" to allow developers to access and use the data. The information you can get access to includes roll-call vote (voice and division votes are not available right now). The Times does extra calculations including party totals.

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I recently suggested that the way we approach new development is the most important factor in determining the long term value of our work. But just how can developers using Drupal make the most of open source by ensuring that participating and contributing is an essential part of our daily workflow? Here are some practical tips that come out of our experience at CivicActions and that can guide you in deciding how to approach new development to get the full benefit of open source. Read on as well for a discussion of patching vs. hacking vs. forking and of how to get attention for your patches.

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When developing in Drupal, should we hack something together that's specific to a site? Or should we instead take the time to do things "right" by improving existing modules or writing our own new modules to contribute to the community? When is one of these options better than the other? How do we decide? It's a key set of questions. All but the most basic projects will require some level of new development. The way we approach this new development is probably the most important factor in determining the long term value of our work, both for us and for our clients.

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I noticed on the Drupal development mailing list, that Drupal 7 has some significant changes for file handling. From Angie Byron (webchick): I just rolled the second in the series of Drupal 7 unstable releases for developers (see http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2008-October/031094.html for more info). Among the highlights this release are: * Several awesome File API improvements. Files are now "first-class objects" like nodes and users are, the API has been dramatically cleaned up for better consistency, AND there are a slew of new hooks like hook_file_load() and hook_file_validate() for contrib modules to react to when stuff happens to files. This is a great enabler for some awesome stuff in core like image handling and document management. See http://api.drupal.org/api/search/7/hook_file for more info. A HUGE shout-out to Andrew Morton (drewish) for sticking with this patch throughout its long, LONG development cycle. :)

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I just read of Charles Leadbeater's book project, We-Think on World Changing. Leadbeater and his publisher have pre-released his book about new forms of collaboration and organization. From the introduction:

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