Open Source and Open Government Take the Stage at the State Department

Open source technology and collaborative models will matter in media, mapping, education, smarter cities, national security, disaster response and much more in 2011 and beyond. The success of open source in building systems that work at scale offers an important lesson to government leaders as well: to meet grand national challenges and create standards for the future, often it's best to work collectively on them.

The hundreds of people who gathered Friday at the United States Department of State spent the day parsing open source at Tech@State, the technology conference organized by the office of eDiplomacy.

Open source is playing an important role in open government, although it's hardly a precondition for it. Whether it's Energy.gov or House.gov moving to Drupal, middleware for open government data or codesharing with CivicCommons, open source matters more than ever.