Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Democracy, government, and GitHub
Clay Shirky is a frequent speaker on TED. The other day I ran into his recent talk on how democracy, government, and GitHub are related. That's not self-evident to be so I looked in.
GitHub, for the unaware, is an open source source-control system (aka configuration management, or source repository) from the genius' at LINUX. The big claim to fame with GitHub is that is completely distributed, no central control, but has a shared protocol for managing updates and relations about and between objects.
Shirky comes into when he discovers that even government agencies are using it to manage the relationships, something like mind maps, among constituents, regulations, statutes, and documents.
Very interesting idea when you think about it. And lots of project management applications at the PMO level, as well as at the cost account or work package or iteration level.
Here below is the TED presentation, but equally interesting is this explanation of how GitHub works using a project document as the object:
