Open Data
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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 Internal Benefits of External Data
2013 was a big year for municipal open data, but I think 2014 will be even bigger. Last year saw the development of an interesting dialog on open data focused on the proper goals for government open data programs. With their roots in transparency efforts, a growing number of people observed that open data programs… Continue reading
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How Open Data Can Help Fight the Flu
This season, influenza activity started about 4 weeks early and was intense. Influenza-like-illness rose quickly to well above the baseline of expected activity and remained elevated for 15 consecutive weeks, making this season slightly longer than average. — 2012-2013 Flu Season Wrap Up, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention When open data and an acute… Continue reading
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Open Data and “Exoproduction”
I’ve been thinking about a way to describe what I have seen happening in the world of open data over the past few years, where outside developers create new applications and solutions built with government data to provide a service or transaction that might otherwise be provided by a government agency (or not provided at… Continue reading
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Five Ways to Make Government Procurement Better
Nothing in recent memory has focused attention on the need for wholesale reform of the government IT procurement system more than the troubled launch of healthcare.gov. There has been a myriad of blog posts, stories and articles written in the last few weeks detailing all of the problems that led to the ignominious launch 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 