Open Government
-
Local Focus Drives Apps for Metro Chicago
Really like the information I am getting about the Apps for Metro Chicago contest. This OpenGov app development contest seems to have taken a lot of the learnings from other contests and incorporated them into some of the things that define how it will operate. Case in point, a focus on “local usefulness” – here… Continue reading
-
“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
-
App Contests and Open Data: Alive and Well
Earlier this month, an article appeared in Government Technology magazine focusing on the legacy of the opengov app development contest, pioneered in Washington DC several years ago with the Apps for Democracy contest. This article raises some important questions for app contest organizers, particularly governments that may view them as a way to stimulate interest… Continue reading
-
Building an Open311 Application with Node.js and CouchDB
Lots of work is being done to finalize the next version of the Open311 API spec (officially referred to as GeoReport V2). Almost a year ago I launched TweetMy311 – a service that lets people report non-emergency service requests using a smart phone and Twitter. Since then, a lot has changed – not only with… Continue reading
-
The Key to Open Gov Success: Common Standards
There is a really good post on the state of open government in Canada and the use of specific data licenses by Canadian cities over on David Eaves’ blog. His post raises an important issue for the open government movement, one that I believe will ultimately determine it’s success or failure – the adoption of… Continue reading
-
CfA Hosts Lab Day in Philly
Code for America Philadelphia is hosting an event this Friday at Indy Hall in Philly. Lab Day is a chance to get together with the CfA Philly team, developers and civic hackers to share ideas and work on projects to make Philadelphia a better place. If you haven’t yet met the CfA Philly team, or… Continue reading
-
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
-
Echoes of Manor.GovFresh
A new year means retrospection and resolutions. For me, looking back on 2010, one of the most memorable events I participated in was an event held in Manor, TX. that focused on the use of new technologies by local governments. The Manor.GovFresh event – organized by GovFresh founder Luke Fretwell – cast a long shadow… Continue reading
-
Tapping into Open Government
This past weekend, I had the pleasure of hanging out with a bunch of fellow geeks for the better part of a day in Philly at Neomind Labs to work on an open government / open data project as part of the Open Data Hackathon. Though most of us had just met, we were able… Continue reading
-
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 