startups
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PFC: A Cautionary Tale for Civic Tech
In a month of chaotic vaccine distribution rollouts, no government’s effort has been more dysfunctional, or controversial, than that of Philadelphia. To spearhead delivery of COVID-19 vaccines to city residents, the City of Philadelphia decided to partner with a young startup called Philly Fighting COVID (PFC). 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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Data Driven Startups
It’s been almost 10 months since I wrote a post on this site about steps that governments can take to encourage and support civic startups, and over 2 years since my first post on the connection between open data and entrepreneurship. It’s really cool to see high ranking public officials like Federal CTO Todd Park… Continue reading
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Over 230 Startups Apply to Code for America
Just a little over six weeks ago, Code for America opened up applications for the CfA Startup Accelerator. Honestly, when we did, we thought we would receive maybe a dozen or two applications. We weren’t sure if folks would know what we meant by “civic,” or be able to hear about it soon enough to… Continue reading
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Code for America Launches Civic Accelerator
Several weeks ago, I wrote a post about civic accelerators that were spinning up on the East Coast. Following that post came the formal launch of the Urban Apps & Maps Studio in Philadelphia. But another accelerator program in Baltimore, that had been in the formative stages, seems to have hit a dead end with… Continue reading
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Philly Urban Apps & Maps Studio Launches
Yesterday, at the Fox School of Business at Temple University, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter helped launch the Urban Apps & Maps Studio – a civic business incubator that will support the development of software applications to address urban issues in Philadelphia. The video below – by former Code for America fellow Anna Bloom – provides… Continue reading
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Civic Accelerators Taking Off
Over the next few weeks civic accelerator programs will be launched in several East Coast cities, building on the momentum started by the announcement of the Code for America (CfA) backed civic accelerator in San Francisco. As I telegraphed in a tweet earlier today, announcements for these new efforts are imminent. Clearly the idea of… Continue reading
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Open Gov, Open Data, Open Doors to New Business
Great article in TechPresident today about San Francisco’s efforts to start a civic accelerator with Code for America, and what other cities are doing to implement the same idea in their own way. Government 2.0 geeks will no doubt find the news exciting and look to San Francisco as a beacon illuminating the way forward… Continue reading
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Will A Lack of Procurement Reform Smother Civic Startups?
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post listing five things that governments can do in 2012 to encourage and foster civic startups. Though the month of January is not yet over, we now an interesting case study developing in the City of Chicago that highlights the overwhelming importance of one of these five items… Continue reading
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Interview on Gov 2.0 Radio
I had the pleasure of talking with Allison Hornery of Gov20Radio this weekend on civic hacking, civic startups and open government data. You can listen to this interview here. 2012 is going to be a big year for civic hacking and I make some fairly strong assertions about what we’ll see this year in terms… 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 