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Bridging the CitiStat Gap
One of the realities of being a Chief Data Officer is that your day is often filled with meetings where you are the least popular person in the room. Working with government agencies to release data – particularly if agencies are new to the open data process, or if the data in question has not…
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Hearts and Minds and Open Data
Some people are taking a rather pessimistic view – or at least a “glass half full” view – of a recent study from the Pew Research Center. A new study from Pew – entitled “American’s Views on Open Government Data” – looks at the general public’s perception of open data efforts at all levels of…
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Civic Tech: Days of Future Past
A new focus on the user These days, in the world of civic technology, it’s all about the user. Digital government service redesign, with an enhanced focus on a higher quality user experience, is being institutionalized in the federal governments of the U.K., U.S and Australia. The civic technology community is rallying around a new…
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I Hate Open Data Portals
Well, not really – But I do dislike certain things about most open data portals. Even the ones that I work with every day or that I have been involved with in the past. Don’t get me wrong – I’m a true believer in the power of open data. I love that every day there…
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Getting More Civic In Our Apps
Uber is not generally characterized as “civic technology” company. But the recent announcement their request API seems like a real game changer to me. Today, the Uber API team is excited to announce the public release of our Request endpoint. With the Uber API’s initial launch last August, we made it easy to surface information…
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Enabling the Enterprise
Its not often that I run across posts about enterprise architecture that get me excited. This one – by Tariq Rashid – did. Very much so. This issue interests me because its one that, as a former state IT executive and policy advisor, I have personal history with. I also believe its an issue that…
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Civic Tech Fundamentals
If you want to learn more about how design thinking is changing the way that digital public services are being built, you’d be wise to check out the latest issue of Civic Quarterly. It’s full of great insights from some of the best thinkers on this topic. The idea of building civic technology “with, not…
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Command Line Data Science
When it comes to deriving useful results about the operation of government from open data sets, we have an enormous array of tools at our disposal that we can make use of. Often, we do not need sophisticated or expensive tools to produce useful results. In this post, I want to use command line tools…
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Pursuing Change by Finding Balance
The recent crash of a quadcopter drone on the grounds of the White House has drawn attention to the absence of final rules from the FAA governing unmanned aircraft – rules that have now been in the works for years. This one incident almost perfectly encapsulates the difficulty that governments have with keeping pace with…
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On Barriers to Adopting New Technologies
Interesting story in the Washington Post describing a survey of federal government technology managers. The big takeaway from this survey seems to be that the majority of IT managers are enthusiastic about new technology and can see how it helps them do their jobs more effectively, but they question the government’s ability to keep pace…
Civic Innovations 