civic hacking
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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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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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The Year That Civic Hacking Changed Everything
Back in January, I predicted that 2012 could turn out to be the year of the civic startup. And while I think that civic startups and other businesses built around open data and government innovation made great strides in 2012, more than anything else what happened this year demonstrated to me the real transformative power… 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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The App Economy and Government as a Platform
Most people in the civic technology world have heard of the concept of “government as a platform” – the term famously coined by Tim O’Reilly several years ago to describe the application of Web 2.0 concepts to government. I talk to people in municipal government about this concept on an almost daily basis, and I… 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
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3 Reasons to Care About Open Data
As CIO for the District of Columbia, Vivek Kundra helped usher in the era of open government by saying that he wanted to “democratize” government data – putting it in to the hands of talented people outside of government that could build useful things with it. Thinking about the hundreds of civic hacking events that… Continue reading
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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
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 