Civic Innovations

Technology, Government Innovation, and Open Data

Open Source

  • Open311 Goes Big Time

    This was a big week for the Open311 initiative. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra joined Gov 2.0 rock star Mayor Gavin Newsom from the City of San Francisco to announce a national initiative to adopt a common standard for a 311 API. The number of supporters for the initiative is growing, and I think it’s high Continue reading

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  • The Growth of Civic Apps

    A pretty good indicator of the growth in the number of “civic applications” can be seen in the creation of some new application directories. City-Go-Round is a really nice site that pulls together dozens of applications that relate to travel and transit systems. It lets users enter a zip code so they can identify apps 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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  • Prowling for NY Senate Bill Status Updates

    Ever since I started working on a multi-modal application for looking up the status of a bill in the New York State Legislature using the fabulous Open Leg API from the NY Senate, I’ve been thinking about ways to enable “subscriptions.” By subscriptions, I mean allowing people to specify which bill (or bills) they are Continue reading

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  • Coming Full Circle on 311

    Tomorrow in New York City, developers, project managers, public policy specialists and others will come together to discuss an open standard specification for 311 services. One of the primary motivators for this discussion is the work that has been done by the District of Columbia which has deployed an open API for reporting 311 requests. Continue reading

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  • Open Gov Data = The New Outsourcing

    It’s been a tough few months for old school government IT outsourcing initiatives. Projects in Virginia, Texas and elsewhere are under increased scrutiny, or just plain in trouble. Over the last year and a 1/2, a handful of forward thinking governments have started to lay the groundwork for a new way of outsourcing IT work Continue reading

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  • Spanish Language Support Enabled for Bill Lookup

    I continue to tinker with my application that allows multi-channel access to the NY Senate Open Leg API. This application allows users to obtain bill information and status through a variety of different user agents. I’ve now added support for Spanish language callers to the telephone interface. I translated all of the prompts using Google’s Continue reading

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  • Open Source Leadership in the First State

    If you visit the State of Delaware’s official web page, you will find that the state is making use of the open source blogging software WordPress. There are (for now) a small collection of WordPress-based blogs set up as subdomains on the state’s official .gov domain. Although there are other state government entities making use Continue reading

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  • Leveraging the Government 2.0 Platform

    A couple months back, I was thrilled to see the New York State Senate expose an API for querying the status of bills in its Legislative Information System. The release of this API is just one component of an exciting change underway in the Senate’s IT management (under NY Senate CIO Andrew Hoppin and his Continue reading

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  • Opening Government Data – the San Francisco Way

    The City of San Francisco recently unveiled a one-stop clearinghouse for all sorts of data generated and maintained by city agencies. Its an exciting first step in an effort that is high on the agenda of San Francisco CIO Chris Vein and Mayor Gavin Newsom – a tangible and visible commitment to open source technologies, Continue reading

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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.

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