Neal Ungerleider – “By sharing code, jurisdictions can cut IT development costs and better use resources. But it’s “a matter of cultural change. When the city of Chicago decided to publish open source code that could be used to predict critical health code violations at local dining establishments, they did something unusual with it: They published it to GitHub. The move, made at the end of 2014, was essentially made as a dare to data wonks to improve Chicago’s public health. By publishing code on Github, the city of Chicago hoped online strangers could refine their code and improve their prediction models. Chicago is just one of a number of state and local governments using Github, a repository for source code and software project management that’s a mainstay of the private sector tech world. Overcoming a government IT culture that prizes keeping data in closed silos and avoiding unexpected complications, Github has slowly but surely been making inroads in the relatively conservative world of government tech. According to the Silicon Valley-based company, the number of county, state, and local government organizations using GitHub has jumped from 30 in 2012 to 250 in 2015. There are also 300 federal organizations on GitHub, as well as a large number of foreign government entities.”