Talk about community collaboration with most developers and the word inserted above would be source.
Talk about collaboration environments such as GitHub and most people would say it’s a code management tool. In fact, their homepage mentions it explicitly: “… collaboration, code review, and code management for open source and private projects.”
That’s probably about as much as I had thought about collaboration environments such as GitHub until I attended the GitHub Gov Meet-up organised by FutureGov in London earlier this month.
What became clear throughout the evening is that these tools and environments, traditionally the stomping ground of software engineers, aren’t just being used for code any more. Source code, data, a novel, an idea, a piece of legislation, a joke, a list of pet names, a cupcake recipe, it’s all the same to an environment like GitHub: it’s text; it can be collaborated on; compared; have a history; be forked; be merged; be open.
The focus of the GitHub Gov Meet-up was specifically about how GitHub is used, or could be used, by Governments wanting to become more open. The various speakers discussed some interesting uses of GitHub that I certainly hadn’t considered. It gave me some new words to put after Open…
Open Source: We all know this one: open source; open standards; open interfaces. Where collaboration environments such as GitHub have their roots.
Open Data: Governments and other organisations are opening large data sets to the public. Government information previously sat on an internal server can now be consumed, corrected, augmented and collaborated on by the general public. This reduces some of the overhead of maintaining datasets as the community is likely to help with corrections and additions as they work with the data.
Open Process: The UK Government Digital Service uses GitHub for open collaboration on a number of projects (https://github.com/alphagov). Some of these projects are around processes and how the UK Government works. By opening process GDS is providing a window into the inner workings of Government and allowing the community to contribute back into those processes and potentially improve the way their Government works.
Open Legislation: True democracy in action? Some Government departments are experimenting with opening legislation and bills for community discussion and collaboration. Although the size of any collaboration community will be far too small for any change requests to be representative of the affected population as a whole, in principle, making legislation open provides a means for the public to affect legislation directly rather than relying on abstract representation.
Overall the GitHub for Gov meet-up introduced some interesting concepts. These are, in a number of cases, experimental and in their early days. What is clear is that there’s huge potential for Government to be open and collaborate with their citizens online through tools such as GitHub and who knows, one day we may get to the point where laws aren’t set by a privileged few in a closed room but by the people that they affect.
