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Open government is great. At least, it was a few election cycles ago. FOIA requests, open data, seeing how your government works-it's arguably brought light to a lot of not-so-great practices, and in many cases, has spurred citizen-centric innovation not otherwise imagined before the information's release.

"The open-source world has learned to deal with a flood of new, oftentimes divergent, ideas using hosting services like GitHub - so why can't governments? In this rousing talk Clay Shirky shows how democracies can take a lesson from the Internet, to be not just transparent but also to draw on the knowledge of all their citizens."

Loomio is free and open source software for anyone, anywhere, to participate in decisions that affect them

"What can governments learn from the open-data revolution? In this stirring talk, Beth Noveck, the former deputy CTO at the White House, shares a vision of practical openness - connecting bureaucracies to citizens, sharing data, creating a truly participatory democracy. Imagine the "writable society" ..."

"One such thing is happening in the Netherlands: thousands of civil servants belonging to all government organizations have built their own "intranet" using Pleio ("government square", in Dutch) a platform that runs on the open source networking engine Elgg."

Article about Finland's crowd sourced policy making and the Open Ministry.