An OpenGov tip comes our way via the @Data_BC team sharing the latest news of how the Province is now using Github to connect with developers
This repo’s content is focused on providing information, examples and guidelines to facilitate the creation and governance of BCGov Open Source projects.
From the Official Government Data blog, Todd Wilson, Senior Enterprise Architect, Office of the CIO…
The Province of British Columbia has joined GitHub as part of the BCDevExchange experiment. The Province has set up an organisation on GitHub where all of the Province’s open collaboration will be housed. If you don’t know it, no worries—GitHub is a social software coding service that lets people keep track of different versions of what they are making, typically software code. It supports comments, document management, and feature requests.
Tooling up for Open Collaboration
GitHub is the most widely-used community for open collaboration on source code files and boasts a community of nearly four million people sharing code in millions of repositories.
We are going to where the community is—but our start with GitHub is really modest. In the spirit of experimentation, it’s going to be a tool and a practice we are going to need to learn about.
The kind of open collaboration GitHub is designed to foster can be really powerful. Most of us have learned the basics of “share and share alike” and “many hands make light work.” Recognizing these two really simple ideas work phenomenally well together, the tech sector has used open collaboration on technology projects since the very first days of the internet.
The potential to bring the skills and ideas of private sector companies, provincial government ministries, individual developers and broader public sector bodies like Crown Corporations and municipalities make it a great way to test the ideas behind the BCDevExchange experiment—particularly our ability to not only share code, but accept changes from others.