Sunlight is absolutely delighted to announce that Mitch Kapor has joined the Sunlight Foundation’s board of advisors.

Mitch’s list of accomplishments will leave you breathless. He’s the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the original chair and currently on the board of directors of Linden Lab, a member of the advisory board for the Wikimedia Foundation, board member of the Mozilla Foundation, the founder of the Open Source Applications Foundation, founder of Foxmarks, and founder and trustee of the Mitchell Kapor Foundation.

And most importantly, he was an early outside advisor to Sunlight. We look forward to having him as an even closer advisor to our work.

Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, gave a very interesting talk (audio and slide show available) at last month's Web 2.0 Summit in Toronto. Mark advocates creating cities that think like the Web - and says cities can learn from projects like Mozilla.

Mark's main point: openness and participation created a better Internet...They can also create a better city. Much like how Mozilla formed a decade ago to open up the Internet, improve the Web and encourage people to participate, the same principles of openness and participation can also help make better cities.

Mark gave three examples of where this is already happening: FixMyStreet.com: a project of our friends at MySociety.org in the United Kingdom where municipal problems are registered; Google/Transit: where users can get step-by-step transit directions from most major cities around the world; and Washington, D.C.'s own AppsForDemocracy.org: the District's open innovation contest where technologists battled it out to see who could create the most useful applications from D.C.'s Data Catalog. The things these three programs have in common is that they encouraged participation and openness and each have the potential to make the cities function better. Plus, the cities are not doing the heavy lifting, he adds. He advocates three ideas: 1. Open the data; 2. Crowdsource info gathering that helps the city; and 3. Ask for help creating a city that thinks like the Web. He ends with pointing to President-elect Obama's promise to "use cutting-edge technologies to reverse this dynamic, creating a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America's citizens." And I would only add that Web 2.0's "architecture of participation" and openness not only has profound implications for making cities function better, but it also holds great and transformative promise for all government, from the president and Congress on down.

Last fall, the government of South Africa announced that it was adopting Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Open Document format (ODF) as official standards for government communications.  South Africa's moves are adding further momentum to the global trend among governments and other institutions to adopt open standards. South Africa joined such countries as Brazil, China, Spain, India and Malaysia, as well as municipal and regional governments in other countries (Massachusetts and New York here in the states), in using open source as a way to encourage efficiency and effectiveness of governance, to cut IT costs, foster the development and competitiveness of their national software industries, and as means to compete worldwide.

Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, writing at his commonspace blog, links to audio of a talk given by Aslam Raffee, chairperson of the South African government's OSS working group. Raffee was speaking at last week's Open Everything Cape Town event where he gave an update on the transformation and discussed the challenges that they have encountered. "We've done very well in terms of setting policy, but very poorly at implementation," he said. "We've got to fix that." Surman summarized by saying the government is on track to have all departments have ODF capability by the end of the year; Microsoft is integrating ODF into Word; and the government's document management is likely to be open source.

I guess it's not surprising that some challenges remain, however, including the need to convince certain government entities to embrace openness. There is a certain amount of reticence remaining among the bureaucracy. And apparently South Africa lacks skilled open source developers. Hmmmm. Sounds like an opportunity.