Social Ch@nge

Code for America is a recent project in the US.  The elevator pitch: attract high-quality programmers to speed up the process of ”opening up” government data.  The non-profit brings together Web 2.0 talent with city managers, government officials.  This is a great idea, a model for collaborating across traditional industry/government lines. 

That said, I’ll be interested to see how this rolls out.  Although it’s early days, I wonder how they have found working with the culture of government – which is often so very different from the culture of a tech startup.  Ultimately, this initiative is going to have to do some culture shifting – simply combining the raw ingredients may not yield the desired results.

And – where’s Code for Canada?  As the protests against the centralization of power in this country build online, a little online transparency might be a good idea for the PM right now…