InSourceCode developers work on "Madison" with volunteers.

There wasn't a great deal of hacking, at least in the traditional sense, at the "first congressional hackathon." Given the general shiver that the word still evokes in many a Washingtonian in 2011, that might be for the best. The attendees gathered together in the halls of the United States House of Representatives didn't create a more interactive visualization of how laws are made or a mobile health app. As open government advocate Carl Malamud observed, the "hack" felt like something even rarer in the "Age of the App for That:"

Impressed @MattLira pulled off a truly bipartisan tech event on the hill. …

Apache Web Server, GNU/Linux Operating System, MySQL Database, Mozilla's Firefox Browser.

All pillars among the open-source community.

Each of these deserves its imminent position as a venerated project. Each has changed the world, and not a little. Moreover, they are the projects that spring to mind when we seek to justify the brilliance of the open-source licensing and development models.

But if this is intended to be a list of the highest-impact and most significant open-source projects, there is a project missing from this list.

VA VistA.

VA VistA is arguably the best electronic health record (EHR) in existence. It was developed over the course of several decades by federal employees in a collaborative, open-source …

A href="http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=33d934c165e69e4b507504c2b&id=8771dc3ae5&e=77c352ede8#mctoc1">report
from the Peer to Patent initiative shows
that the project is having salutary effects on the patent system.
Besides the greater openness that Peer to Patent promotes in
evaluating individual patent applications, it is creating a new
transparency and understanding of the functioning of the patent system
as a whole. I'll give some background to help readers understand the
significance of Manny Schecter's newsletter item, which concerns prior
art that exists outside of patents. I'll add my own comments about
software patents.

Let's remind ourselves of the basic rule of patenting: no one should
get a patent for something that was done before by someone else. Even
if …

Today, the United States Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) unveiled a new National Broadband Map, which can be viewed at BroadbandMap.gov.

The map includes more than 25 million searchable records and it incorporates crowdsourced reporting. Built entirely upon Wordpress, the map is also one of the largest implementations of open source and open data in government to date.

Importantly, the data behind the map shows that despite an increase in broadband adoption to 68%, a digital divide persists between citizens who have full access to the rich media of the 2011 Internet and those who are limited by geography or means.

The launch of a national map of broadband Internet access fulfills a Congressional mandate created by the 2009 federal stimulus, which …

One of the themes from News Foo that continues to resonate with me is the importance of data journalism. That skillset has received renewed attention this winter after Tim Berners-Lee called analyzing data the future of journalism.

When you look at data journalism and the big picture, as USA Today's Anthony DeBarros did at his blog in November, it's clear the recent suite of technologies is part of a continuum of technologically enhanced storytelling that traces back to computer-assisted reporting (CAR).

As DeBarros pointed out, the message of CAR …

One of the Department of Energy's flagship open government initiatives, Open Energy Information (OpenEI), was on display at the recent National Science Festival. Ryan McKeel, an engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, talks about how OpenEI provides access to data, models and tools in the following clip:

OpenEI is "open" in any number of important ways, including open source and open linked data, as Debbie Brodt-Giles, the OpenEI project leader, notes in an Amazon case study (OpenEI is hosted on Amazon's Web Services platform). "Key platform software for OpenEI includes Apache, Semantic MediaWiki, MySQL, and …

This week's review comes as the nation comes to grips with the expanding scope of its worst environmental disaster in living memory, as the extent of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico becomes more clear. Despite the dire circumstances, the fact that I was able to stream President Barack Obama's first address to the nation from the Oval Office using the White House app on my iPhone as I walked home was a reminder of new ways government can use technology to share information. When I arrived home, I was able to stream the rest of the speech from WhiteHouse.gov/live, coupled with real-time press reaction on Twitter. And after the speech, I watched a real-time YouTube question and answer session with Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and White House new media director Macon …