Open Knowledge Conference

Civic Commons: Sharing Technology for the Public Good

Civic Commons is a non-profit initiative that helps governments build and use shared and open source technologies to improve public services, transparency, citizen participation, and management effectiveness, all while saving money. In a digitally interconnected world, cities and other governments don’t have to operate in isolation: they can pool their resources — their talents and ever-shrinking budgets – to build shared technologies, save money, and innovate.

We will discuss how Civic Commons is working directly with governments to turn the applications they’re developing into shareable public goods, to catalog this technology and knowledge, and build connections among governments, vendors and developer communities.

We are working to strengthen and connect the worldwide network of government and civic technologists.

by Philip Ashlock  on July 1st at 12:00 in Workshop III

Philip Ashlock  helps to facilitate collaboration between cities and other government bodies on the development of open standards and best practices for civic technology and open government initiatives. Working at OpenPlans.org Phil helped launch the non-profit Civic Commons with a focus on developing a community knowledgebase around civic technology. He has also been leading the development of the Open311 standard so that cities can leverage web enabled issue reporting services in an open and interoperable way.