Cities
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It’s Not About Cheaper, It’s About Better
The Wall Street Journal recently featured an awesome story about civic hacking, focusing on the amazing work being done in the city of Chicago. It’s great to see the efforts of civic hackers and open data advocates covered in the mainstream press, and the team in Chicago – those both inside and outside of city… Continue reading
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This Is How It’s Supposed To Work
Openness in government strengthens our democracy, promotes the delivery of efficient and effective services to the public, and contributes to economic growth. — Federal Executive Order on Open Data, Section 1. People in the open government community talk a lot about the potential and promise of open data. The things that it might enable. The… Continue reading
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Why Publish Open Data?
I get this question a lot, particularly from government officials who may still be skeptical about the real benefits. And though I feel like I’ve made the open data pitch a thousand times before, working in city government for the past year has focused me on the practical aspects of this question. What are the… Continue reading
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Hacking Without Borders
The Idea On June 1st and 2nd, cities across the country will take part in a national civic hacking event being coordinated under the auspices of the White House. Philadelphia and Baltimore – two cities with long histories of hacking events, and active civic hacking communities – are both holding local events as part of… Continue reading
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Shutting Down a Civic Project
It’s never easy to shut down a civic project or app, but sometimes its the right thing to do. And so it is with a project I started at the original Apps for SEPTA event in Philadelphia during the Fall of 2011. Effective last Friday, SEPTAlking stopped accepting phone calls and text messages for the… Continue reading
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On Data Standards for Cities
Creating open data standards for cities is really, really hard. It’s also really, really important. Data standardization across cities is a critical milestones that must be realized to advance the open data movement, to fully realize all of the potential benefits of openly publishing government data. More and more people are starting to realize the… Continue reading
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Open Data and the Digital Divide
I had the pleasure recently of taking part in a series on WHYY’s Radio Times focusing on Philadelphia Innovators. I got a chance to talk about what the City of Philadelphia is doing to release more open data to technologist, entrepreneurs and researchers in an effort to spur innovation. Host Maiken Scott led a great… Continue reading
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Getting RHoKed in Philly
This past weekend, civic hackers gathered at the new Drexel ExCITe Center for the latest installment of the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon in Philadelphia. In addition to a new location for this latest installment of RHoK, the event was organized by TechnicallyPhilly (in previous years, TechnicallyPhilly had been a collaborator and supporter of the… Continue reading
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An SMS-Enabled Polling Locator
This is a great weekend for civic hacking. Daylight Savings Time has given us an extra hour, advances in telephony application development have made it dead simple to build text messaging applications and Google has given us the Civic Information API. With an election on Tuesday, I wanted to build a quick application that demonstrated… Continue reading
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Data Driven Startups
It’s been almost 10 months since I wrote a post on this site about steps that governments can take to encourage and support civic startups, and over 2 years since my first post on the connection between open data and entrepreneurship. It’s really cool to see high ranking public officials like Federal CTO Todd Park… 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 