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Open311 Goes Big Time
This was a big week for the Open311 initiative. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra joined Gov 2.0 rock star Mayor Gavin Newsom from the City of San Francisco to announce a national initiative to adopt a common standard for a 311 API. The number of supporters for the initiative is growing, and I think it’s high…
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Twitter, Facebook, Geotagging and 311
Several weeks back, I wrote a quick post about the new locational functionality being rolled out in Twitter. Now that this new functionality is being supported by more and more Twitter clients, I think its time for an object lesson in how Twitter’s new locational feature (and soon Facebook’s) can be used to engage citizens…
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NoSQL Telephony with Tropo and CouchDB
In the last two posts, I’ve provided a basic overview of how to create cloud telephony applications using the Tropo platform and CouchDB. In the first post of this series, I walked through a quick install of CouchDB and provided information on getting a Tropo account set up. In the second post, we created a…
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The Growth of Civic Apps
A pretty good indicator of the growth in the number of “civic applications” can be seen in the creation of some new application directories. City-Go-Round is a really nice site that pulls together dozens of applications that relate to travel and transit systems. It lets users enter a zip code so they can identify apps…
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Command Line GeoTwitter
A few months back I wrote a quick post about tweeting from the command line. With the recent announcement that Twitter’s location feature is starting to go live, I decided to revisit this idea, with an eye toward adding locational information. (I am, at heart, a cheapskate – I could have bought one of the…
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Opening a Dialog on New York State Legislation
Innovative things on the transparency front continue to emerge from Albany, thanks to the crew working for the NY Senate CIO. The latest – an Open Legislation portal that allows New Yorkers to search for bills by sponsor, status or keyword and to initiate a dialog on bills. Users of the site can comment on…
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Toronto Opens Government Data
The City of Toronto recently joined a growing fraternity of governments to release public data sets for developers and other interested parties to use to create interesting and useful mashups. It’s gratifying to see more and more cities place an emphasis on releasing open data sets to the public. Toronto’s open data web site is…
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Prowling for NY Senate Bill Status Updates
Ever since I started working on a multi-modal application for looking up the status of a bill in the New York State Legislature using the fabulous Open Leg API from the NY Senate, I’ve been thinking about ways to enable “subscriptions.” By subscriptions, I mean allowing people to specify which bill (or bills) they are…
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Coming Full Circle on 311
Tomorrow in New York City, developers, project managers, public policy specialists and others will come together to discuss an open standard specification for 311 services. One of the primary motivators for this discussion is the work that has been done by the District of Columbia which has deployed an open API for reporting 311 requests.…
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Open Gov Data = The New Outsourcing
It’s been a tough few months for old school government IT outsourcing initiatives. Projects in Virginia, Texas and elsewhere are under increased scrutiny, or just plain in trouble. Over the last year and a 1/2, a handful of forward thinking governments have started to lay the groundwork for a new way of outsourcing IT work…
Civic Innovations 