Open Innovation—The Passion Behind the Civic Commons Community

From the beginning, Civic Commons has been a dynamic community initiative. What began in January 2010 as a simple wiki of open government policies and practices (originally called “OpenMuni”, domains for which were simultaneously and independently obtained by Code for America and OpenPlans), grew into a partnership between the two organizations to support the growing open government technology movement, and is now an open community of civic hackers, government technologists, entrepreneurs and many others.

Over the course of the past year, thanks to the generous support of the Omidyar Network, the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation, we’ve been able to expand our activities, providing technical support to a number of civic open technology projects, from continuing development of the Open311 standard to working with governments to open source in-house projects like Checkbook NYC and the Weave data visualization platform, and building out community information resources like the Civic Commons Marketplace. We’ve done all of this with our amazing team, including a group of 2011 Code for America (CfA) fellows...