Development Tools
Category for discussing development tools and IDE’s for VoiceXML and voice applications.
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Onboarding Civic Hackers
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending a civic hacking event jointly organized by Code for Philly and Girl Develop It Philly. The event had a tremendously good turnout – over 50 people by my count – making it one of the larger events Code for Philly has organized in recent months. The… Continue reading
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The Lesson of PennApps
A couple of weeks ago, I attended the most recent PennApps hackathon – a biannual college hackathon in Philadelphia that has grown from somewhat humble beginnings a few years ago to one of the largest college hackathons in the world. Attendance at the event has swelled to over 1,000 participants from colleges across the country,… 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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“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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Experiments in Open Data: Baltimore Edition
A lot of my open gov energy of late has been focused on replicating a technique pioneered by Max Ogden (creator of PDXAPI) to convert geographic information in shapefile format into an easy to use format for developers. Specifically, Max has pioneered a technique for converting shapefiles into documents in an instance of GeoCouch (the… Continue reading
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Building Multichannel Transit Apps with Tropo
This post is the third in a series about building an open source transit data application using GTFS data from the Delaware Transit Corporation. In the first post, I described how to download the State of Delaware’s transit data and populate a MySQL database with it. In the previous post, I walked through a process… Continue reading
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Democratizing Transit Data with Open Source Software
Democratizing government data will help change how government operates—and give citizens the ability to participate in making government services more effective, accessible, and transparent. — Peter Orszag, OMB Director This post is a continuation in a series on building a transit data application using GTFS data recently released by the State of Delaware. If you… Continue reading
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How to Build an Open Transit Data Application
Earlier this year, I had the chance to work with one of my state’s Senators to draft and pass a bill requiring the state’s transit agency to publish all of it’s route, schedule and fare information in an open format for use by third parties. This bill was signed into law by the Governor a… Continue reading
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A ‘Glass Half Full’ View of Government App Contests
An increasing number of people are starting to suggest that the concept of the “app contest” (where governments challenge developers to build civic applications) is getting a bit long in the tooth. There have been lots of musings lately about the payoff for governments that hold such contests and the long term viability of individual… 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
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 