GitHub — Heralding the Open Government

I have been struggling with the problem of ensuring governments work. My search has brought me here, to a concept I know and love — Open Source.

The philosophy behind open source software has created a vibrant community that spans across geo-political borders. It has had its victories and losses over the years, and has become adopted by giant companies and startups alike.

The world sees that “open” is, most of the time, the way to go when building software that is supposed to serve a wide variety of people.

GitHub has played a major part in this movement, and as a result, is the darling of the open source community. It is responsible for a lot of the structure that powers the politics behind open source software, such as Issues, Pull Requests, Blames, and Reviews.

With GitHub and its features, people from all over the world collaborate easily on projects, and build wonderful software every day.

There’s a lot of politics involved in open source. A lot of disagreements, debates, voting, fighting, twitter rants — the typical stuff we’d see take place in a House of Commons/Representatives, or a Senate.

Yet somehow,

• Deadlines are met (sometimes not)

• Quarrels are settled with sound arguments in debates, and where impossible, people make forks (clones) of the project to go work on their ideas.

• People socialise, meet each other, become friends.

• People learn from one another, thus the quality of talent, which translates to output grows exponentially.

How has the community achieved such an ideal, in a few years, where governments have failed?

In my opinion, a lot of it points back to GitHub.

The features implemented by the open source giant are tailored to manage politics in a way never before known.

Pull Requests

GitHub’s pull requests make it possible for anyone to contribute to a project by adding a feature, or fixing an issue with it.

Issues

GitHub’s issues double as a Task Manager and Issue Resolution tool.

With it, you can:

• Raise concerns

• Track solutions to the concerns you have raised

• Manage the creation of new features

Comments

GitHub’s user comments on commits, issues and pull-requests aid reviews by ensuring quality, and direction towards the project’s objectives.

Here is where people provide feedback to steps taken, and raise their opinions, helping improve the standard of the project.

It’s easy to see how these features foster progress, with openness and transparency at their very core.

How can we apply these to Government?

Can governments be operated in this manner too?

We’ll consider these questions in the next article in this series.