ATO2014: How Raleigh Became an Open Source City
Next up was Jason Hibbets and Gail Roper who gave a talk about the open source initiative in Raleigh.
Gail started by saying ‘no one told us we had to be more open’. Instead there were signs that showed that this was a good way to go. In 2010 Forbes labeled Raleigh one of the most wired cities in the country, but what they really want is to be the most connected city in the country.
Raleigh has 3 initiatives open source, open data, and open access – the city wants to get gigabit internet connections to every household. So far they have a contract with AT&T and they are working with Google to see if Raleigh will become a Google fiber city.
The timeline leading up to this though required a lot of education of the community about what open meant. It didn’t mean that before this they were hiding things from the community. Instead they had to teach people about open source and open access. There were common stereotypes that the government had about open source – the image of a developer in his basement being among them.
Why did they do this? Why do they want to be an open city? Because of SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud). Today’s citizens expect that anywhere on any device they should be able to connect to the web. Government organizations like Raleigh’s will have 100x the data to manage. So providing a government that is collaborative and connected to the community becomes a necessity not an option.
“Empowerment of individuals is a key part of what makes open source work, since in the end, innovations tend to come from small groups, not from large, structured efforts.” -Tim O’Reilly
Next up was Jason Hibbets who is the team lead on opensource.com by day and by night he supports the open Raleigh project. Jason shared with us how he helped make the open Raleigh vision a reality. He is not a coder, but he is a community manager. Government to him is about more than putting taxes in and getting out services – it’s about us – the members of the community.
Jason discovered CityCamp – a government unconference that brings together local citizens to build stronger communities where they live. These camps have allowed for people to come together to share their idea openly. Along the way the organizers of this local CityCamp became members of Code for America. Using many online tools they have made it easy to communicate with their local brigade and with others around the state. There is also a meetup group if you’re in the area. If you’re not local you can join a brigade in your area or start your own!
Jason has shared his story in his book The foundation for an open city.
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