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Spanish Language Support Enabled for Bill Lookup
I continue to tinker with my application that allows multi-channel access to the NY Senate Open Leg API. This application allows users to obtain bill information and status through a variety of different user agents. I’ve now added support for Spanish language callers to the telephone interface. I translated all of the prompts using Google’s…
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Open Source Leadership in the First State
If you visit the State of Delaware’s official web page, you will find that the state is making use of the open source blogging software WordPress. There are (for now) a small collection of WordPress-based blogs set up as subdomains on the state’s official .gov domain. Although there are other state government entities making use…
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Lots of Gov 2.0 Potential in Twitter Geolocation
So the new Twitter hotness will be the ability to add locational data to individual Tweets – not sure on exactly when this new feature will go live, but it will require someone wishing to add locational data to their tweets to: Explicitly opt in to this feature by changing their Twitter account settings. Utilize…
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Longevity for Open Data and Gov 2.0
People that work for Gartner are starting to use “hype cycle” and “Gov 2.0” in the same sentence (or rather, sentences that are really really close together). There is also a thoughtful piece on GovLoop examining which aspects of Gov 2.0 are on the right track and the wrong track. I’ve raised similar questions about…
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Leveraging the Government 2.0 Platform
A couple months back, I was thrilled to see the New York State Senate expose an API for querying the status of bills in its Legislative Information System. The release of this API is just one component of an exciting change underway in the Senate’s IT management (under NY Senate CIO Andrew Hoppin and his…
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Opening Government Data – the San Francisco Way
The City of San Francisco recently unveiled a one-stop clearinghouse for all sorts of data generated and maintained by city agencies. Its an exciting first step in an effort that is high on the agenda of San Francisco CIO Chris Vein and Mayor Gavin Newsom – a tangible and visible commitment to open source technologies,…
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Looking for Collaborators
I’m thinking about starting a project to develop an application that uses crime incident data from the City of San Francisco and allows people to identify crimes that occur close to their homes and/or places of business. I worked on a similar project for the original Apps for Democracy contest last year. Crime incident data…
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Identi.ca Looking Pretty Good!
For those government agencies using Twitter for notification, 311 and other services I’ll bet its been a tough morning. They may want to have a look at Identi.ca – a competing (albeit much smaller) micro-blogging site that even piggybacks on Twitter’s API. I’ve said before that government’s need to spread the love among different social…
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It’s About the Crowd
Last night, when the polls closed for the special election in Delaware’s 19th Senate District, people across the state fired up their browsers and pulled up the web site for the Department of Elections to check the results. And then they waited… And waited… And waited some more. The waiting is the hardest part The…
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Ten Two Ways To Make Twitter Useful For Government
eWeek Europe has an article up listing 10 ways to make Twitter useful for governments. The time is ripe for such thinking – more and more governments are using Twitter to interact with citizens, and its fitting that governments spend some time thinking about how this tool can be used most effectively. Still, the eWeek…
Civic Innovations 