GitHub is a web‐based digital project hosting service that facilitates collaboration. We introduce how GitHub works and assess how it has been used in the public sector in Canada based on interviews with federal government leaders and a survey of Canadian public service GitHub users. With little research to date on public sector use of GitHub, and none on its use in Canadian governments, we explore the early experience with this collaboration tool and consider the possible implications for collaboration in government.
Public organizations have interacted with citizens through increasingly sophisticated internet-enabled technology. Participatory platforms emerged from Web 2.0 technologies in the mid-2000s as a governance mechanism to engage citizens in the process of effecting social change. Although the potential of platforms is recognized, its successful implementation has faced challenges. To begin to get a handle on how to best design and manage participatory platforms, we conducted an exploratory participatory action research study grounded in two events – The Policy Challenge and NSF Workshop on Participatory Platforms with a Public Intent. Both events communed practitioners, scholars, and citizen participants with diverse experience and expertise conducting and researching platforms. The insights expressed through the events and follow-up interviews and online survey informed our development of a participatory platform lifecycle and design framework to assist designing successful participatory platforms.
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