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OpenGov Year In Review: Baltimore Edition
Following up on my previous post for the City of Philadelphia, this post describes what happened on the open government and open data fronts in the City of Baltimore in 2011.OpenBaltimore Launches The open data movement in Baltimore officially began with the unveiling of the OpenBaltimore data repository in January, 2011. Running on the Socrata…
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OpenGov Year In Review: Philly Edition
The time of year-end reviews and top 10 lists is now upon us, so I’m compiling the details of a watershed year for open data and civic hacking in two cities where I’ve seen huge leaps made in 2011 – Philadelphia and Baltimore.In this first installment, I’ll focus on the “City of Brotherly Love” and…
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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…
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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…
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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 The application is no longer active, and the TweetMy311 twitter account won’t respond to any more mentions.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…
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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…
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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…
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“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…
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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…
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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…
Civic Innovations 