Cities can develop solutions more efficiently if they collaborate using open standards and open source. Several major cities (NYC, Toronto, D.C., more) are already coming together to help develop an open standard for 311 services with Open311. Cities and developers are also coming together to share solutions for transit, Open Trip Planner for example. Cities first have to open up their public data and civic technology if they want to benefit from developer communities and other cities. As a brilliant example of sharing, the open data and open source legislation that was recently presented in Portland actually borrowed some of the language from similar legislation in Vancouver.

- Philip Ashlock, TOPP Labs, The Open Planning Project, NYC