Civic Innovations

Technology, Government Innovation, and Open Data

October 2009

  • Prowling for NY Senate Bill Status Updates

    Ever since I started working on a multi-modal application for looking up the status of a bill in the New York State Legislature using the fabulous Open Leg API from the NY Senate, I’ve been thinking about ways to enable “subscriptions.” By subscriptions, I mean allowing people to specify which bill (or bills) they are… Continue reading

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  • Coming Full Circle on 311

    Tomorrow in New York City, developers, project managers, public policy specialists and others will come together to discuss an open standard specification for 311 services. One of the primary motivators for this discussion is the work that has been done by the District of Columbia which has deployed an open API for reporting 311 requests.… Continue reading

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  • Open Gov Data = The New Outsourcing

    It’s been a tough few months for old school government IT outsourcing initiatives. Projects in Virginia, Texas and elsewhere are under increased scrutiny, or just plain in trouble. Over the last year and a 1/2, a handful of forward thinking governments have started to lay the groundwork for a new way of outsourcing IT work… Continue reading

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  • Spanish Language Support Enabled for Bill Lookup

    I continue to tinker with my application that allows multi-channel access to the NY Senate Open Leg API. This application allows users to obtain bill information and status through a variety of different user agents. I’ve now added support for Spanish language callers to the telephone interface. I translated all of the prompts using Google’s… Continue reading

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About Me

I am the former Chief Data Officer for the City of Philadelphia. I also served as Director of Government Relations at Code for America, and as Director of the State of Delaware’s Government Information Center. For about six years, I served in the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), and helped pioneer their work with state and local governments. I also led platform evangelism efforts for TTS’ cloud platform, which supports over 30 critical federal agency systems.

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