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:
- Transparency. Government should provide citizens with information about what their government is doing so that government can be held accountable.
- Participation. Government should actively solicit expertise from outside Washington so that it makes policies with the benefit of the best information.
- Collaboration. Government officials should work together with one another and with citizens as part of doing their job of solving national problems
We couldn’t be happier. CivicActions was founded on Openness. It is one of our three core values (the other two being Balance and Trust). Our value of openness is embodied in our commitment to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) including Drupal and CiviCRM, but also the Openwall (OWL) GNU/Linux operating system on our servers, and the applications that many of us use every day: Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, Ubuntu, Eclipse — and the list goes on. The licensing of our content — blog posts, proposal templates, estimating tools — are all also licensed under a Creative Commons license.
CivicActions is delighted to learn and share about this new chapter in the United States government.
We look forward to the impact that the Open Government Directive will have on our country and the world. And we are excited about how we will participate in this future.
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