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Uniting the Open Source efforts in eParticipation29. July 2008 – 08:42 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH) |
Almost all eParticipation projects are combinations of social methods and some sort of web based technology. At the BerlininJuly summit 2008 we discussed the aspect of open source technology for eParticipation which lead to some interesting thoughts and conclusions.
In many cases the persons developing these technologies want to share their ideas and advances with the greater eParticipation community. To do so some of them publish the work as open source projects which can be reused under some sort of open licence like the GPL. There are different ways to store the actual code of the software and manage open source projects from the technical side like Sourceforge or Google Code. These services do their job extremely well but they are scattered around the net and not specifically aimed at the topic of eParticipation.
On the other hand organizations looking into using eParticipation tools and methods are often confronted with the problem that they need to develop both the method and the technology needed and are not aware of already existing open source projects offering a solution. As a result many technologies are reinvented in different countries and different contexts even so the fitting technology would have been available. Read the rest of this entry »
