Civic Innovations

Technology, Government Innovation, and Open Data

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  • A Tale of Two City Hackathons

    I had the pleasure of traveling to Austin, TX last week for the SXSWi festival and to present on civic hacking events in Baltimore and Philadelphia. The presentation I gave can be viewed below. There’s also a storify covering my session here (courtesy of @sam_piroton) I had a lot of fun preparing this presentation as…

  • Coding towards critical mass

    It’s a rare thing to get a glimpse inside of a truly creative organization, to learn how it works and to identify lessons that can be applied elsewhere. A recent New York Times article on the staggering history of innovation at Bell Labs offers a glimpse inside the mind of the man responsible for the…

  • Storming the City Walls with Code for America

    Last year, I wrote about a civic hacking event that took place in Philadelphia at the office of Azavea. The event last year was organized by the team of Code for America fellows working for the year in Philadelphia. Exactly one year to the day later, the latest group of fellows working in Philadelphia held…

  • GET /open/government/apis

    Roughly three years ago, Tim O’Reilly defined a vision for “Government as a platform.” Today, there are around 240 API’s listed on Programmable Web that identify as “government” APIs. This number is sure to climb in the weeks and months ahead, as more and more governments, public authorities and agencies deploy APIs for developers to…

  • Philly Urban Apps & Maps Studio Launches

    Yesterday, at the Fox School of Business at Temple University, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter helped launch the Urban Apps & Maps Studio – a civic business incubator that will support the development of software applications to address urban issues in Philadelphia. The video below – by former Code for America fellow Anna Bloom – provides…

  • Civic Accelerators Taking Off

    Over the next few weeks civic accelerator programs will be launched in several East Coast cities, building on the momentum started by the announcement of the Code for America (CfA) backed civic accelerator in San Francisco. As I telegraphed in a tweet earlier today, announcements for these new efforts are imminent. Clearly the idea of…

  • Civic Hackers Unite!

    In late February and early March, a series of civic hacking events will take place as part of the new Code for America Brigade program. More than a dozen events will take place from Honolulu to Philadelphia and places in between. One of the primary goals of this new program from Code for America is…

  • Open Data Needs Champions

    If you’ve spent any time on a subway platform or at a bus stop lately, you may have witnessed one of the great success stories of open government data. All of those people checking the arrival and departure times of trains, trolleys and buses are consuming applications built with open transit data. It’s a great…

  • Practical Hackathons: Free is not Always Better

    This is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts with practical advice for organizing and running hacking events, particularly those focused on building civic apps and using open government data. These posts will lead up to, and (hopefully) follow a talk I’m giving at SWSWi in March discussing the outcome…

  • Open Gov, Open Data, Open Doors to New Business

    Great article in TechPresident today about San Francisco’s efforts to start a civic accelerator with Code for America, and what other cities are doing to implement the same idea in their own way. Government 2.0 geeks will no doubt find the news exciting and look to San Francisco as a beacon illuminating the way forward…