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Onboarding Civic Hackers
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending a civic hacking event jointly organized by Code for Philly and Girl Develop It Philly. The event had a tremendously good turnout – over 50 people by my count – making it one of the larger events Code for Philly has organized in recent months. The…
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The Internal Benefits of External Data
2013 was a big year for municipal open data, but I think 2014 will be even bigger. Last year saw the development of an interesting dialog on open data focused on the proper goals for government open data programs. With their roots in transparency efforts, a growing number of people observed that open data programs…
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2013 Civic Blogging in Review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many…
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Three Hard Truths for Government Procurement Reform
Advancing the innovation agenda within government often means confronting the harsh reality of the government procurement process. This is not a new problem, and there are a number of initiatives underway in governments around the country aimed at “streamlining” or “overhauling” the government procurement process to support the acquisition of new technologies and projects that…
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How Open Data Can Help Fight the Flu
This season, influenza activity started about 4 weeks early and was intense. Influenza-like-illness rose quickly to well above the baseline of expected activity and remained elevated for 15 consecutive weeks, making this season slightly longer than average. — 2012-2013 Flu Season Wrap Up, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention When open data and an acute…
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Open Data and “Exoproduction”
I’ve been thinking about a way to describe what I have seen happening in the world of open data over the past few years, where outside developers create new applications and solutions built with government data to provide a service or transaction that might otherwise be provided by a government agency (or not provided at…
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Five Ways to Make Government Procurement Better
Nothing in recent memory has focused attention on the need for wholesale reform of the government IT procurement system more than the troubled launch of healthcare.gov. There has been a myriad of blog posts, stories and articles written in the last few weeks detailing all of the problems that led to the ignominious launch of…
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Communities Matter
Philadelphia is unique among big cities in how it publishes open data for civic hackers, journalists, entrepreneurs, researchers and other users. The City of Philadelphia has designated the community-built Open Data Philly website as it’s official data directory for open data – we’re the only big city in the country (maybe the only city period)…
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The Lesson of PennApps
A couple of weeks ago, I attended the most recent PennApps hackathon – a biannual college hackathon in Philadelphia that has grown from somewhat humble beginnings a few years ago to one of the largest college hackathons in the world. Attendance at the event has swelled to over 1,000 participants from colleges across the country,…
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It’s Not About Cheaper, It’s About Better
The Wall Street Journal recently featured an awesome story about civic hacking, focusing on the amazing work being done in the city of Chicago. It’s great to see the efforts of civic hackers and open data advocates covered in the mainstream press, and the team in Chicago – those both inside and outside of city…
Civic Innovations 