Open Government News & Articles

It’s not often the words transparency and citizen engagement are used in the same sentence, but they are essential elements if you really want to innovate and evolve your community into taking meaningful action. Which is why the folks at Granicus announced new features aimed at empowering its Citizen Participation Suite users to better collect and analyze feedback from their community.

They're from the government and they're here to help you. No, really. Some of the biggest collectors of data are the various governments, whether on a national, state and regional or local level. Increasingly, governments are making this data available to developers, who are using it to produce applications.

Granicus (news, site) announced the acquisition of Daystar Computer Systems this week, resulting in the combination of cloud-based government transparency tools and agenda management products. Together, the companies hope to boost innovation and enrich transparency, legislative workflows, and citizen collaboration.

 Granicus (news, site) recently revealed a strong Q4, increasing new client additions by 100% over Q4 2009 and exceeding sales results from Q1 and Q2 2010 combined. The surge in the company's numbers not only reflects the effectiveness of their offerings, but also the growing need for open government and transparency initiatives. 

With increased government transparency in mind Granicus (news, site) has launched a new Open Platform API and Certified Partner Network.

If your company or project is heavily involved in the open scene (open source, open data, open government, etc) then one conference you may want to consider for 2010 is the Open World Forum (news, site). Not only do you get a chance to hobnob with people working and thinking hard on how to further drive openness on many levels, you get to do it in Paris.

In the never-ending argument over which country is Number 1, the UK has just surpassed the US in one particular area: that of open data.