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Thinking Small on Civic Tech
Designing simple systems is one of the great challenges of Government 2.0. It means the end of grand, feature-filled programs, and their replacement by minimal services extensible by others. — Tim O’Reilly, Open Government The original idea of Government as a Platform is now almost a decade old. In the world of technology, that’s a…
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Who Uses Civic Tech?
Who uses civic technology, and why should we care? A new study from mySociety – a non-profit based in the UK that focuses on civic tech – helps us answer these questions and provides some invaluable information for the civic technology community, and for governments. mySociety surveyed civic technology users in four countries to understand…
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Density and Destiny
How land is zoned can be a critical factor in reducing income inequality and reducing the number of people living in high poverty areas by providing good options to the poor for secure, safe, affordable, and stable housing.
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Rethinking Residency Requirements
As we move further and further into the digital age, the governments that are most successful at exploiting technology to improve performance and efficiency will be those that are built to attract and retain highly skilled technology employees.
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Participation and the Cult of Catalogs
“Anonymous access to the data must be allowed for public data, including access through anonymous proxies. Data should not be hidden behind ‘walled gardens.’” – 8 Principles of Open Government Data In the world of open data, there are few things that carry more weight than the original 8 principles of open data. Drafted by a…
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Buck the system or work the system?
“Systems are broken because they exist to sustain themselves, and the people who run the system rely on the system to stay the same. Why should they change it? It works well for them.” — Chris Guillebeau My friends at Technical.ly Philly ran an interesting piece yesterday about the long road to the release of…
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No Assembly Required
When we think about all of the work being done in the civic technology and open government communities over the last several years, it’s easy to see the impact. Evaluated just in terms of the number of datasets that have been released by governments it is clear that the impact of those advocating for more…
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The Civic Hacker Hacked
“The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class. It began innocently, no doubt. The association of the hacker ethic with startups might have started with an authentic counter-cultural impulse on the part of outsider nerds tinkering away on websites. But, like all gentrification, the influx into the scene…
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Why 18F’s New Approach to Procurement Reform Matters
In another recent post, I talked about how public sector technology procurement was not well suited for the digital age. But there are some efforts underway that seek to identify new methods of procuring technology solutions for government. As these ideas start to take hold, there is hope that those in the govtech community will create a…
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GovTech is Not Broken
When we talk about the challenges that face governments in acquiring and implementing new technology, the conversation eventually winds around to the procurement process. That’s when things usually get ugly. “It’s broken,” they say. “It just doesn’t work.” What most people who care about this issue fail to recognize, however, is that while the procurement…
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