code samples
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Urban Storytelling with Open Data
One of the most important qualities of open data is that it can provide unparalleled insight into how a city works. Open data empowers urban storytelling – the process of identifying a trend, or some important characteristic of an urban area and then presenting that information in a compelling way for others. When I speak… 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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From “Zero to Civic” in 5 Minutes
One of the most powerful things about open government data is all of the options it enables. Open data is the single most important ingredient in civic apps, and it can also power visualizations, mashups and countless other civic uses. The very best open data typically lends itself to several different kinds of uses. When… Continue reading
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GET /open/government/apis
Roughly three years ago, Tim O’Reilly defined a vision for “Government as a platform.” Today, there are around 240 API’s listed on Programmable Web that identify as “government” APIs. This number is sure to climb in the weeks and months ahead, as more and more governments, public authorities and agencies deploy APIs for developers to… 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.