Matthew Burton has written a spectacular essay on government service and citizen tech development, Why I Help “The Man”, and Why You Should Too, available here, and reprinted on techPresident here.
I’ve witnessed a great deal of enthusiasm for creating a community of practice and better coordination for citizen technology politicos/political web devepers. I’ve been preparing a post on the groundswell of coordinative activity both within and from outside government, and this essay provides a great context within which to describe such enthusiasm.
For now, here’s an excerpt from Matthew’s post:
What we need is a foundation that serves as the middle man between government needs and programmers’ abilities. Even better, we need a community of coders who are committed to improving the inner workings of DC, and doing it in a way that inherently promotes transparency while fighting government waste. We need a Mozilla Foundation for the government. A stateside Geekcorps. A geeky Americorps. An army of impassioned programmers committed to improving the government’s information services, both internal and those it provides to the public. It would make government more organized, accountable and effective, and it would save them a lot of tax dollars. And the result—open access to the code that runs our country—is a great first step toward the kind of government transparency we’re after.
Absolutely worth reading in full.
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