2012: Open Innovation for Government

As we turn the calendar to the new year, we'd like to take a moment to reflect on what we've done here at Civic Commons over the past year, what we've learned, and where we're planning on heading next.

It's been a busy year for us. While the Civic Commons initiative began, slowly, as an informal partnership between Code for America and OpenPlans in early 2010, we really began working in earnest last May, thanks to generous startup support from the Omidyar Network, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Knight Foundation...

Thus far, we've focused our work in three core areas: (1) helping governments adopt open source practices so that they can benefit from each other's investments in technology; (2) supporting the development of "open platforms", such as Open311, which represent a fundamentally different approach to technology development;and (3) building open knowledge infrastructure around the policies and practices involved in implementing these approaches...