Development Tools
Category for discussing development tools and IDE’s for VoiceXML and voice applications.
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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
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Making Democratic Participation Frictionless
This week, I had the pleasure of presenting at the Emerging Communications Conference & Awards (eComm) event in San Francisco. I gave a presentation on the convergence of two powerful trends that promise to deliver more and more choices to people in how to communicate, interact and transact with their governments. The first is the… Continue reading
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OpenGov APIs: Interfacing with Open Government
There has been lots of good talk (and a good deal of action) lately around open government APIs at events like Transparency Camp, Where 2.0 and on the Twitters. So, as a prelude to a talk I’ll be giving at eComm next month, I wanted to write a post surveying the landscape of recent government… Continue reading
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NoSQL Telephony with Tropo and CouchDB
In the last two posts, I’ve provided a basic overview of how to create cloud telephony applications using the Tropo platform and CouchDB. In the first post of this series, I walked through a quick install of CouchDB and provided information on getting a Tropo account set up. In the second post, we created a… Continue reading
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Toronto Opens Government Data
The City of Toronto recently joined a growing fraternity of governments to release public data sets for developers and other interested parties to use to create interesting and useful mashups. It’s gratifying to see more and more cities place an emphasis on releasing open data sets to the public. Toronto’s open data web site is… Continue reading
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Lots of Gov 2.0 Potential in Twitter Geolocation
So the new Twitter hotness will be the ability to add locational data to individual Tweets – not sure on exactly when this new feature will go live, but it will require someone wishing to add locational data to their tweets to: Explicitly opt in to this feature by changing their Twitter account settings. Utilize… Continue reading
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Building an IM Bot for the NY Senate OpenLeg API
The NY Senate made an exciting announcement today – a host of new open source software and services are being deployed to enhance transparency in what the Senate does. This is big news, and a major tip of the hat goes to the NY Senate CIO, Andrew Hoppin, and his staff. They are doing amazing… 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 