Open Source
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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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Looking for Collaborators
I’m thinking about starting a project to develop an application that uses crime incident data from the City of San Francisco and allows people to identify crimes that occur close to their homes and/or places of business. I worked on a similar project for the original Apps for Democracy contest last year. Crime incident data… Continue reading
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It’s About the Crowd
Last night, when the polls closed for the special election in Delaware’s 19th Senate District, people across the state fired up their browsers and pulled up the web site for the Department of Elections to check the results. And then they waited… And waited… And waited some more. The waiting is the hardest part The… Continue reading
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Building an IM Bot for the NY Senate OpenLeg API
The NY Senate made an exciting announcement today – a host of new open source software and services are being deployed to enhance transparency in what the Senate does. This is big news, and a major tip of the hat goes to the NY Senate CIO, Andrew Hoppin, and his staff. They are doing amazing… 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 