Open Source Government In San Fran?

It was only a matter of time, but San Francisco has opened up it's information pipeline in a more accessible fashion to the fine residents of this city. For people in the ad biz, 'open source' is not a new term. A former client of mine is an open source platform for creatives. An advertiser can submit a proposal to an online community (a similar user interface to Facebook), and people from all over can collaborate to submit a project to the advertiser. A director from LA could find a guy with a green screen in Burbank, while their graphic designer for the new logo is in San Fran.

Wikipedia defines open source as "the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content."

Long story short, the idea has come to the business of running SF....

courtesy Fast Company

It's a good thing Gavin Newsom checks his Twitter feed during meetings. Otherwise, San Francisco's mayor would've missed a life-changing missive about ... potholes? "It really made me wonder," he says. "What if we used social media to make our city services work better?" That stray tweet led to the city's first-of-its-kind Twitter account (@SF311), which encourages residents to send queries and messages about nonemergency issues. But it also underscores the city's open-source stance on government. Just as Google, Facebook, and Twitter released their programming interfaces to app makers, San Francisco opened its arsenal of public information -- train times, crime stats, health-code scores -- to software developers. "There's a tremendous amount of tech talent here," Newsom says. "We'd be fools not to leverage it." To date, more than 140 data sets have been liberated, spawning roughly 30 smartphone apps, such as Crimespotting (browse interactive city-crime maps), Routesy (see real-time train schedules), and EcoFinder (locate the nearest recycling spots). But San Francisco's open-source stance doesn't stop at the city limits: In February, it launched an idea-sharing site, which blueprints everything from citywide health insurance to banning plastic bags. And in March, it released the API for its 311 city-service center. Boston; Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; and Washington, D.C., have already pledged to adopt the new standard.