A lesson in openness
I just stumbled upon the BBC's Common Platform blog. Here's how the blog's author describes the purpose of the website:
The BBC is opening up to the people and communities that fund it—sharing content, code, talent and resources. At Common Platform I'm documenting the changes as they take place, talking to the people making them happen and asking questions of those who'd rather they didn't.
Although still in its early days, the blog already reads like a fascinating diary of an organisation's attempt to open up and become more transparent and accountable to its constituencies. It is particulary refreshing to read interviews with "real" BBC staff, see their pictures and read their views about barriers to sharing content and resources with the external world.
When shall we see an equivalent website for development institutions?
(Something to add to my development 2.0 wishlist).
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Giulio,
My name is Melanie Rieback, and I am an Asst. Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.
I just started a brand new open-source SW project addressing the kinds of "Development 2.0" wishlist items that you have been writing about in your blog. Our project is called 'Microvolunteerism' and our Wiki is located at: www.microvolunteerism.org.
You can read about our ideas and objectives on the website.
Our project is only ~1 week old, so we are still in the requirements gathering and community building phase. However, despite our project's being so young we've already got ~10 people (volunteers + NGO employees) "on board", that are brainstorming with us to help the project take shape. Additionally, we are in the process of applying for grants/subsidies, so we can hopefully hire some full-time programmers in the short-term future.
To see what's happening in our project, I advise you to take a look at our Brainstorm mailing list.
http://microvolunteerism.org/mailman/listinfo/brainstorm
Any help with brainstorming would be most welcome! The quicker we can define the problem, document the requirements, and create a set of SW specifications (from the end-user perspective), the quicker we will be able to create a useful platform for the development community.
Cheers!
Melanie
--
Dr. Melanie Rieback - Assistant Professor
Vrije Universiteit, Faculty of Science, Dept. of Computer Science
De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Tel: +31 (20) 598 7874 / Fax: +31 (20) 598 7653 / Url:
www.cs.vu.nl/~melanie
Posted by: Melanie Rieback | Nov 17, 2008 12:08:51 PM