Open Government
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Mid-Atlantic Osmosis
I had the pleasure of attending the UnWIREd conference in Baltimore this past weekend, and got a chance to watch people that love their city engage in a productive dialog about how to make it better. I have lots of friends in Baltimore, and attending civicly-focused events there is always fun because of the passion… Continue reading
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Creating the Commons
“Building a culture of collaboration and participation is a key ingredient to making innovative programs work in cities.” Listen to an interview I did recently for Gov20 Radio on municipal collaboration and innovation. Continue reading
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Open Gov: What’s gone Right, What’s gone wrong
I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at the recent MIT-Kinght Foundation Civic Media Conference in Boston. The panel was chaired by Susan Crawford and included Chris Vein, Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation, and Mike Norman from WeFunder.com. The panel discussed what has worked well in the open government… Continue reading
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Philly Tech Week Hackathon Recap
On Saturday, April 28th, the 2nd Philly Tech Week came to a close. Like the inaugural Philly Tech Week last year, this weeklong series of technology events and panels concluded with a hackathon focused on open government data and journalism. I gave a brief preview of this event over on the Code for America blog,… Continue reading
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Building The New Civic Hackathon
Sometimes, a word can’t do justice to an idea. To some, the word “hackathon” means a somewhat narrow, one-dimensional kind of event that attracts software developers cloistered away to tinker with new APIs – fueled by pizza, Red Bull and the incessant beats of the very latest dubstep jam. And while hackathons of all varieties… Continue reading
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Open Government and the Bully Pulpit
Last week in Honolulu, the Mayor got on a bus. And while this may seem like a small thing, it’s just the latest example of how mayors and municipal leaders are using the weight of their offices to advance the agenda of open government. Mayors are not often known for their prowess at writing code.… Continue reading
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Apps for SEPTA Recap
At some point in the next few days, I’ll have time to do a proper recap of the civic hacking event I organized with the gang from Devnuts to build transit apps for the Philadelphia region, but in the interim I’ll provide this short post. The event was awesome! We had a full house of… Continue reading
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Speech Recognition for Open311
Really excited about a new project I started recently to enable phone-based speech recognition for 311 service requests. Here is a screen cast demonstrating the solution. I write about it in detail on the Tropo blog. Head on over the get the details, or check out the code for this solution (still a work in… Continue reading
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Saying Goodbye to TweetMy311
Sometimes in order to move forward into the future, you need to let go of things from the past. This weekend, I’m officially decommissioning the TweetMy311 project, an Open311 project I launched over a year ago. The application is no longer active, and the TweetMy311 twitter account won’t respond to any more mentions. The process… Continue reading
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The Road Ahead for Open Baltimore
A couple of months ago, I wrote about the state of the open data program in the city of Baltimore. At the time, the buzz from a day of civic hacking with data released by the city was still palpable and the developers of an application built in the wake of this event stood ready… 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 