Governments Get Open On GitHub

A new GitHub site aggregates and showcases the open source repositories managed by governments and civic minded hackers

The recent U.S. government shutdown has left a lot of people more discouraged than ever about the abilities of our elected representatives in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. Now that the government is back open for shenanigans - er, I mean, business - this is probably a good time to point out that some people in government are actually doing some things right. At least they are if you’re a fan of open source and open data, in which case there was some extra good news last week, aside from the end of the shutdown showdown.

Last week, GitHub announced the creation of government.github.com, a site that brings together all of the GitHub-hosted open source projects owned by governments and civic-minded techies around the world. The site currently includes over 120 organizations from all over the world, including those representing national governments and departments, states, counties, cities and civic hackers. All in all they represent hundreds of repositories.