Development Tools
Category for discussing development tools and IDE’s for VoiceXML and voice applications.
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Building the Government Data Toolkit
We live in a time when people outside of government have better tools to build things with and extract insights from government data than governments themselves. These tools are more plentiful, more powerful, more flexible, and less expensive than pretty much everything government employees currently have at their disposal. Governments may have exiting relationships with… Continue reading
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Thinking Small on Civic Tech
Designing simple systems is one of the great challenges of Government 2.0. It means the end of grand, feature-filled programs, and their replacement by minimal services extensible by others. — Tim O’Reilly, Open Government The original idea of Government as a Platform is now almost a decade old. In the world of technology, that’s a… Continue reading
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Turning Government Web Content Into APIs.
Inspired by a recent Open City project that repurposes data on sewage in the Chicago River, I wanted to work through a quick example of turing a web page that houses useful information on water quality in Philly into an API. Here is a quick screencast showing how easy it is to take information rendered… Continue reading
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5 Essential Open Data Tools
Every data wrangler has their own list of favorites – the go to tools that they use when they need to work with data. If you need to clean, transform, or mashup data or if you are working with a data set that will form the basis for an application, here is a list of… Continue reading
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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
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 