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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
Civic Innovations 