Open Source
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Communities Matter
Philadelphia is unique among big cities in how it publishes open data for civic hackers, journalists, entrepreneurs, researchers and other users. The City of Philadelphia has designated the community-built Open Data Philly website as it’s official data directory for open data – we’re the only big city in the country (maybe the only city period)… Continue reading
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Experiments in GitHub Based Procurement
The City of Philadelphia is experimenting with some new ideas that we hope will change the way that city departments procure technology solutions. The “petrie dish” for some of the more interesting of these experiments is the social coding site GitHub. The Background Philadelphia is looking for ways to partner more closely with local technology… Continue reading
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Shutting Down a Civic Project
It’s never easy to shut down a civic project or app, but sometimes its the right thing to do. And so it is with a project I started at the original Apps for SEPTA event in Philadelphia during the Fall of 2011. Effective last Friday, SEPTAlking stopped accepting phone calls and text messages for the… Continue reading
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Urban Storytelling with Open Data
One of the most important qualities of open data is that it can provide unparalleled insight into how a city works. Open data empowers urban storytelling – the process of identifying a trend, or some important characteristic of an urban area and then presenting that information in a compelling way for others. When I speak… Continue reading
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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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From “Zero to Civic” in 5 Minutes
One of the most powerful things about open government data is all of the options it enables. Open data is the single most important ingredient in civic apps, and it can also power visualizations, mashups and countless other civic uses. The very best open data typically lends itself to several different kinds of uses. When… 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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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
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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
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 