10k active government users on GitHub

The Federal government gets most of the headlines but there is a civic data revolution going on at the state and city level in the US. Here in Michigan five cities have civic data groups meeting regularly: Detroit, Ann Arbor, Jackson, Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids. Jackson is one of the first cities in the nation to have an open data law in the city charter:

http://www.mlive.com/news/jackson/index.ssf/2014/08/jacksonu...

On the statewide level we're holding the second annual Code Michigan civic hackathon which will expand to three locations this year: Detroit, Newaygo and Marquette.

http://www.codemichigan.com

Watching the U.S. Digital Services `WhiteHouse Playbook` repository has been interesting. Strange really.

In the recent post on Wired with Snowden's recording [1] about why he leaked information, there is a call that seems to be answerable by things like GitHub repository activity. It at least feels like the public and government are finding a way to leverage technology as a means of cooperating on development of our social structure.

https://github.com/WhiteHouse/playbook

There is a lot of activity, to the point where one begins to feel that government activity is actually just another use of git like any other task. Illusion or not, it is starting to feel like the government is interactive.

[1] http://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/

I wish the government would enbrace git for more than just software, like creating law....

I didn't know Github had interns to spend time putting this data together. Pretty cool.

> 10k active government contractors on GitHub

Fixed that for you.