Civic Innovations

Technology, Government Innovation, and Open Data

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  • Apps for SEPTA Recap

    At some point in the next few days, I’ll have time to do a proper recap of the civic hacking event I organized with the gang from Devnuts to build transit apps for the Philadelphia region, but in the interim I’ll provide this short post. The event was awesome! We had a full house of…

  • Speech Recognition for Open311

    Really excited about a new project I started recently to enable phone-based speech recognition for 311 service requests. Here is a screen cast demonstrating the solution. I write about it in detail on the Tropo blog. Head on over the get the details, or check out the code for this solution (still a work in…

  • Saying Goodbye to TweetMy311

    Sometimes in order to move forward into the future, you need to let go of things from the past. This weekend, I’m officially decommissioning the TweetMy311 project, an Open311 project I launched over a year ago. The application is no longer active, and the TweetMy311 twitter account won’t respond to any more mentions. The process…

  • The Road Ahead for Open Baltimore

    A couple of months ago, I wrote about the state of the open data program in the city of Baltimore. At the time, the buzz from a day of civic hacking with data released by the city was still palpable and the developers of an application built in the wake of this event stood ready…

  • Local Focus Drives Apps for Metro Chicago

    Really like the information I am getting about the Apps for Metro Chicago contest. This OpenGov app development contest seems to have taken a lot of the learnings from other contests and incorporated them into some of the things that define how it will operate. Case in point, a focus on “local usefulness” – here…

  • “Phind It For Me” Live in Philly

    Really excited to launch a new OpenGov project in Philadelphia – Phind It For Me. The service is built on PHLAPI and the point data sets it houses. As such, one could understand why I’d be interested in enhancing the data sets currently in PHLAPI. I’m really excited about this project – source code available…

  • App Contests and Open Data: Alive and Well

    Earlier this month, an article appeared in Government Technology magazine focusing on the legacy of the opengov app development contest, pioneered in Washington DC several years ago with the Apps for Democracy contest. This article raises some important questions for app contest organizers, particularly governments that may view them as a way to stimulate interest…

  • Building an Open311 Application with Node.js and CouchDB

    Lots of work is being done to finalize the next version of the Open311 API spec (officially referred to as GeoReport V2). Almost a year ago I launched TweetMy311 – a service that lets people report non-emergency service requests using a smart phone and Twitter. Since then, a lot has changed – not only with…

  • The Key to Open Gov Success: Common Standards

    There is a really good post on the state of open government in Canada and the use of specific data licenses by Canadian cities over on David Eaves’ blog. His post raises an important issue for the open government movement, one that I believe will ultimately determine it’s success or failure – the adoption of…

  • CfA Hosts Lab Day in Philly

    Code for America Philadelphia is hosting an event this Friday at Indy Hall in Philly. Lab Day is a chance to get together with the CfA Philly team, developers and civic hackers to share ideas and work on projects to make Philadelphia a better place. If you haven’t yet met the CfA Philly team, or…