I stumbled into a pretty interesting use of Github yesterday, which I’m seeing as part of a greater push from our government to use the popoular social coding platform. The government blog Govfresh held a live chat session with FCC CIO David Bray (@fcc_cio), where some really interesting questions were asked of the very progressive CIO.
I’m going to break up a few of the questions into separate blog posts, what I wanted to highlight in this post was the use of Github as a chat forum, showing once again that the platform isn’t just about managing code, but can be used to openly manage a multitude of collaborative government technical operations.
Luke Fretwell (@lukefretwell) opened up the discussion which ran for about an hour, asking Bray several questions, and then Steve Spiker (@spjika), myself and the infamous Alex Howard (@digiphile) chimed in with further questions—making for a pretty interesting discussion.
Govfresh used Gitchat, a way of turning Github Issue Management + Github APIs into a chat thread, for the conversation. I like this approach to managing and controlling a live conversation, with the ability to archive for future use. I think it is also a great way to help people in government understand that Github is more than just code, it is also about being very social and collaborative around technical ideas.
