In the last in a series of three posts published on the TechTank Blog at the Brookings Institution, Network post-doc Justin Longo and Tanya Kelley, both of Arizona State University’s Center for Policy Informatics (CPI) and working under the guidance of Network member and CPI Director Erik Johnston, conclude their examination of GitHub’s capacity for fostering public sector collaboration.
“Some will dismiss GitHub as ill-suited to document collaboration, too purpose-built and inflexible, the learning curve too steep, and the interface too unfamiliar. But, remember how ugly our early 1990s websites were? These also existed at least five years before Google helped us find content, and when we had to dial a phone number to connect to the Internet. If we gave up then because the Web was ungainly, hard to use, and slow, we wouldn’t be blogging about it today.
The strengths of GitHub – its socialness, openness, transparency, versioning, feedback, and accountability – are the core of its value, and an ambitious goal is to adapt the underlying Git architecture with a revised user experience more suited to document collaboration.”
