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Open Gov: What’s gone Right, What’s gone wrong
I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at the recent MIT-Kinght Foundation Civic Media Conference in Boston. The panel was chaired by Susan Crawford and included Chris Vein, Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation, and Mike Norman from WeFunder.com. The panel discussed what has worked well in the open government…
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Over 230 Startups Apply to Code for America
Just a little over six weeks ago, Code for America opened up applications for the CfA Startup Accelerator. Honestly, when we did, we thought we would receive maybe a dozen or two applications. We weren’t sure if folks would know what we meant by “civic,” or be able to hear about it soon enough to…
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Bizzaro Budgeting and Public Sector Innovation
Why is it so hard for governments to adopt innovative new technologies? Why does the public sector lag so far behind the private sector in leveraging new technology to create efficiencies? As an organization that works at the intersection of government and technology, these are questions we hear a lot at Code for America. Through…
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Philly Tech Week Hackathon Recap
On Saturday, April 28th, the 2nd Philly Tech Week came to a close. Like the inaugural Philly Tech Week last year, this weeklong series of technology events and panels concluded with a hackathon focused on open government data and journalism. I gave a brief preview of this event over on the Code for America blog,…
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Building The New Civic Hackathon
Sometimes, a word can’t do justice to an idea. To some, the word “hackathon” means a somewhat narrow, one-dimensional kind of event that attracts software developers cloistered away to tinker with new APIs – fueled by pizza, Red Bull and the incessant beats of the very latest dubstep jam. And while hackathons of all varieties…
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Open Government and the Bully Pulpit
Last week in Honolulu, the Mayor got on a bus. And while this may seem like a small thing, it’s just the latest example of how mayors and municipal leaders are using the weight of their offices to advance the agenda of open government. Mayors are not often known for their prowess at writing code.…
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Code for America Launches Civic Accelerator
Several weeks ago, I wrote a post about civic accelerators that were spinning up on the East Coast. Following that post came the formal launch of the Urban Apps & Maps Studio in Philadelphia. But another accelerator program in Baltimore, that had been in the formative stages, seems to have hit a dead end with…
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Phones: The Key to the City
The ordinary telephone is among the most important and ubiquitous technologies in the world. Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking at inciteXchange – an annual conference organized by the Center for Design and Innovation at Temple University’s Fox School of Business. The focus of the event was to bring together speakers on…
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Great Cities and the Shadow of Teotihuacan
Great cities have always had an influence beyond their borders. This is true not only of contemporary cities like New York, Paris and Beijing but also of ancient cities. The influence of Rome can still be seen today in the form of ancient roadways and aqueducts. But whether exporting engineering or religion like ancient Rome,…
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To API, or Not to API
A recent blog post by Peter Krantz has sparked some interesting dialog on whether governments publishing open data for citizens and application developers need to deploy an Application Programming Interface (API) to their data. The full post can be viewed here. It provides a nice set of considerations for governments looking at standing up an…
Civic Innovations 