Cell Phones
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Opportunities for Civic App Developers
There is no shortage of civic hacking events and app challenges taking place. This is a good thing – it demonstrates the health of the civic hacking ecosystem, and the demand for open data to power these apps. However, two especially exciting opportunities for civic app developers seems to also be two of the less Continue reading
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Phones: The Key to the City
The ordinary telephone is among the most important and ubiquitous technologies in the world. Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking at inciteXchange – an annual conference organized by the Center for Design and Innovation at Temple University’s Fox School of Business. The focus of the event was to bring together speakers on Continue reading
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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 Continue reading
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Building an Open311 Application
Earlier this year, I had an idea to build a Twitter application that would allow a citizen to start a 311 service request with their city. At the time, there was no way to build such an application as no municipality had yet adopted a 311 API that would support it (although the District of Continue reading
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What’s Old is New: How Citizens Communicate with Government
Social media enthusiasts (myself included) let out a big huzzah recently at the results of a study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project entitled Government Online. The report, like a similar one several years ago, looks at how citizens communicate and interact with their government. This study focused specifically on online contact Continue reading
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Open Gov: A Means to and End
With all of the activity and excitement taking place around the country focused on new Government 2.0 and open government initiatives, its easy for those involved to get lost in the technology. Those of us that love technology and work with it for a living can get lost pretty quickly in the minutia of implementing Continue reading
About Me
I am the former Chief Data Officer for the City of Philadelphia. I also served as Director of Government Relations at Code for America, and as Director of the State of Delaware’s Government Information Center. For about six years, I served in the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), and helped pioneer their work with state and local governments. I also led platform evangelism efforts for TTS’ cloud platform, which supports over 30 critical federal agency systems.
Civic Innovations 