Code for America

There was a quick keynote this morning put on by Code For America. This really caught my attention and I suggest you go to their website and take a look at what they are working on. There is a video on the first page with some popular figures that can give you a quick idea of what they are about. This is truly amazing and harvests the open source model to really make a difference.

One thing I don't truly understand, is their name. I can see why they would use something like CODE for AMERICA (the caps pattern is taken from their logo). It's very rah rah rah and the colour scheme is surely not an accident.  It gets people's patriotic blood flowing. But why not CODE for PEOPLE and expand their scope? In particular, the Canadian governments are structured differently but are tackling the same problems. Isn't everyone? Why not make it truly open?

EDIT: I asked the previous questions to folks from Code For America that were here at the convention.  Basically, the organization is less than a year old and they've recently grown to three people on their payroll.  They are tackling immediate problems but are aware of other similar groups, notably some folks interested in starting Code For Canada.  The most interesting part of this effort is that they call upon the public to help out with these government inefficiencies and in return, any organization that will profit from projects that come out of this are forced into a transparency clause.  This means that any data that is produced and managed by systems that are born out of this effort will be open.  Also, the code is open source and therefore available to cities outside the US.