The United States Government took a huge step in the right direction when it comes to Open Data. The release of Project Open Data on Github, and using gh-pages, is a big deal.

Within 24 hours they had 7 pull requests. Within 48 hours 12. Today there have been a total of 52 pull requests. That’s pretty incredible.

One of the requests within the first 24 hours was mine. A theme update.

I wanted to help clean up the site a little bit, and make it responsive. They had already used Bootstrap, so I continued with it. There was great feedback and back and forth on the request.

It took a few days to complete the pull, due to the project creators figuring out how to handle all the requests (not a bad thing at all) but then this …

Holy crap, my pull request was merged by Steve VanRoekel, the US Chief Information Officer. And, to top it off, it was the first merge EVER by the US government! I’m very excited to be a part of all of this.

Some of the Twitter traffic

Small piece of history: Today I merged 1st pull request on Project #OpenData. Hope you’ll contribute: project-open-data.github.io

— Steven VanRoekel (@stevenvDC) May 15, 2013

So, U.S. CIO @stevenvdc just approved a @github pull request to retheme a federal website. github.com/project-open-d…

— Waldo Jaquith (@waldojaquith) May 15, 2013

GitHub Pull Request of the Day: github.com/project-open-d…

— Parker (@parkr) May 10, 2013