Just in time for the Glorious Fourth, we bring you inspiring, patriotic quotations from America’s founders — in binary!
In a sense, Thomas Jefferson could be called our country’s technical writer; James Madison, its system architect. And Eleanor Roosevelt was a social media strategist if there ever was one, although her time in the White House predated social media by a good fifty years or so.
This novelty is brought to you by Code for America (CfA), a groovy open-source civic betterment project we found out about earlier this year.
The quotations are available as PDFs — perfect for the patriotic nerds and nerdy patriots who might want to print these out and post them around IT as we approach the national holiday. As CfA staff member Abhi Nemani wrote on the company blog, “For centuries, [Gov 1.0 leaders] have helped define the very principles we want our fellows to realize through Gov 2.0: democracy, participation and patriotism.”
If you’d like to translate the “binary art” messages from Code for America, we found this binary-to-text and text-to-binary conversion tool works nicely.
Of course, if you feel inspired to do more for your country than simply putting up a poster, you can apply to be a CfA fellow and work on projects that will help cities and citizens alike. The coding projects will take about 10 months and will be open-sourced in January 2011. This year, fellows will be working on apps for Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Seattle and Boulder.
The kinds of programs CfA fellows build will solve problems, engage citizens, encourage government transparency and foster efficiency. For example, you could be building an online network to connect neighborhoods with emergency first responders or a permitting system to simplify administration of small business licensing and fees.
At Mashable, we’re enthusiastic about open-source software and by social good projects; if you’ve got the time, we definitely encourage you to apply and to share this opportunity with others, as well.
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