Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Open Source in the Government - How about that?

The principle of open source is not limited to softwares. Gold Corporation, which is considered as the biggest gold producing mining corporation, used the same principle in finding gold. While competitors thought Gold Corp. was insane to have opened its mining plans to the public, the latter's CEO was confident that what he learned from a seminar on open source will also work in its field. Thus, he devised the Gold Corp. Challenge, which was a global competition to attract brilliant minds to check on the corporation's data with the end result of finding the best mining site. And, as they say, the rest is history.

Think - Can we not also apply in the Linus' Law in the Government? Wouldn't many eyeballs make all bugs shallow?

If a lot of people were to know how the government is being run, then we can find the glitches and fix them. People would not only be more participative in good governance but public officers would also be more responsible and take the word "accountability" more seriously. While the Right to Information bill would have helped make this happen, I think we can also do without it. We can be the eyeballs by just being concerned citizens.

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