Development by Davis: Development by Davis: “Community Spotlight: Andrew Krzmarzick, enabling open source and empowering citizens in government” plus 1 more

jueves, 16 de agosto de 2012

Development by Davis: “Community Spotlight: Andrew Krzmarzick, enabling open source and empowering citizens in government” plus 1 more

Community Spotlight: Andrew Krzmarzick, enabling open source and empowering citizens in government

Posted: 16 Aug 2012 03:00 AM PDT

five questions with an opensource contributor

As the Community Manager of GovLoop—a highly active online community connecting more than 50,000 public sector professionals—Andrew Krzmarzick suspects his role is pretty similar to leading an open source project.

The open source way guides the company's decisions, communications, and interactions. And open source solutions enable them to empower citizens around the country (and the world!) who don't want to wait for their cities to make updates to a page or build apps and resources that makes their lives easier.

Hear Andrew speak more on this at the 2012 National Conference for Government Webmasters this year on September 11th in Kansas City. He will discuss citizen generated initiatives—Hackathons, CityCamps, LocalWiki and Facebook pages—that provide the community with much needed, easy to navigate, web-based resources.

Read more...

One bug, millions of dollars lost: An argument for open source solutions

Posted: 15 Aug 2012 04:00 AM PDT

On August 1, Knight Capital Group, a financial services company, lost $440 million in less than an hour because of a software bug. As I understand it, this bug could have been avoided if more thorough testing was done before release but, as the Omaha World-Herald reports, the company "rushed to develop a computer program so it could take advantage of a new Wall Street venue for trading stocks...and failed to fully work out the kinks in its system."

In an op-ed piece in NYTimes.com, Ellen Ullman, a former software engineer and author, talks about how the SEC's call to companies like Knight to "fully test their computer systems before deploying coding changes" is an impossibility. Ellen writes: