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The Year That Civic Hacking Changed Everything
Back in January, I predicted that 2012 could turn out to be the year of the civic startup. And while I think that civic startups and other businesses built around open data and government innovation made great strides in 2012, more than anything else what happened this year demonstrated to me the real transformative power […]
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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 […]
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Getting RHoKed in Philly
This past weekend, civic hackers gathered at the new Drexel ExCITe Center for the latest installment of the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon in Philadelphia. In addition to a new location for this latest installment of RHoK, the event was organized by TechnicallyPhilly (in previous years, TechnicallyPhilly had been a collaborator and supporter of the […]
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3 Reasons to Care About Open Data
As CIO for the District of Columbia, Vivek Kundra helped usher in the era of open government by saying that he wanted to “democratize” government data – putting it in to the hands of talented people outside of government that could build useful things with it. Thinking about the hundreds of civic hacking events that […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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To API, or Not to API
A recent blog post by Peter Krantz has sparked some interesting dialog on whether governments publishing open data for citizens and application developers need to deploy an Application Programming Interface (API) to their data. The full post can be viewed here. It provides a nice set of considerations for governments looking at standing up an […]
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Storming the City Walls with Code for America
Last year, I wrote about a civic hacking event that took place in Philadelphia at the office of Azavea. The event last year was organized by the team of Code for America fellows working for the year in Philadelphia. Exactly one year to the day later, the latest group of fellows working in Philadelphia held […]
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Civic Innovations 