How governments create repositories on GitHub and become really open

The laws can be “forcefully”, and state bodies adopt “Pull Request” - as the government creates repository on GitHub and becomes really open.

GitHub is the largest web service for hosting IT projects and their joint development, which provides all its capabilities for open source projects for free.

A feature of GitHub, which is expressed in its slogan - “Social Coding”, is the joint writing of the code.

Another, informal, slogan of the project is the phrase "Fork You!" (“Bow!”), Which refers to the fact that the open source code allows anyone to do something similar to make a copy of the project ( Fork ) or help improve the existing project ( Pull Request ).

In addition to the code directly, participants can communicate, comment on each other's edits and unite their repositories .

Among the IT companies that place their official repositories on GitHub, you can find famous companies as Facebook, Twitter, Google.

But not only IT companies use GitHub - there is a government.GITHUB.com section on the platform, designed for projects related to the electronic government, open data, civil initiatives and lawmaking.

Starting with one repository five years ago, to date, the section includes more than 500 state institutions, public organizations, governments and municipalities that use GitHub in order to share projects and together with users to work on them.

In the summer of 2009, the Senate of New York became the first government organization to publish the code on GitHub . Washington followed him, and by 2011 cities such as Miami, Chicago and New York, government initiatives of countries such as Australia, Canada and Great Britain, and such federal agencies of the United States as the Federal Commission on Communications and NASA, appeared on GitHub.

What is happening inside the government is often completely closed to outsiders, but thanks to GitHub, many countries began to take steps towards the greater transparency of their legislative processes and their openness for civil participation.

So, the White House published an open data on the platform - it can be found on GitHub with the “Edit page” button at the bottom. This implies that everyone can make changes to the government document and send through the Github Pull Request (a request for the inclusion of changes made), giving the government feedback from the community.

Supporters of the open government have long predicted such a direction in the development of state policy, and the White House was not the only one who began to use GitHub to create a collaborative government.

Among the participants in the platform, you can find repository of government organizations of different countries, for example, Belgium, Germany, Norway, Sweden and many others, as well as such civil organizations as Opengov Foundation, SunLight Foundation and Open Knowledge Foundation.

“We decided to use GitHub for several reasons. The GITHUB is familiar to many developers, and the community of its participants is growing, ” says Data.gov , chief architect of software. “ Thanks to GitHub, it’s easy to“ force ”someone's code, improve the project and involve a wide audience into participation in it.”

The White House publishes the Law on open data as an open document for joint work, the laws of San Francisco can now “force ” , and state bodies adopt Pull Request from developers.

All this is part of the trend in which the government adapts the ideas of openness of both data and politics as a whole. A trend that can lead to the emergence of new forms of the collaboration of the government and citizens in the very near future.