-
Saying Goodbye to TweetMy311
Sometimes in order to move forward into the future, you need to let go of things from the past. This weekend, I’m officially decommissioning the TweetMy311 project, an Open311 project I launched over a year ago. The application is no longer active, and the TweetMy311 twitter account won’t respond to any more mentions. The process… Continue reading
-
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
-
Tapping into Open Government
This past weekend, I had the pleasure of hanging out with a bunch of fellow geeks for the better part of a day in Philly at Neomind Labs to work on an open government / open data project as part of the Open Data Hackathon. Though most of us had just met, we were able… Continue reading
-
Building an Open311 Application
Earlier this year, I had an idea to build a Twitter application that would allow a citizen to start a 311 service request with their city. At the time, there was no way to build such an application as no municipality had yet adopted a 311 API that would support it (although the District of… Continue reading
-
Cleaning up Graffiti. With Twitter.
Can you use Twitter to clean up graffiti? Or patch potholes? Or report a problem with a sidewalk, sewer covering or trash pickup? If you live in San Francisco, the answer is yes. This yes answer will soon apply to the District of Columbia as well, and any other city that adopts the Open311 standard.… Continue reading
-
Twitter, Facebook, Geotagging and 311
Several weeks back, I wrote a quick post about the new locational functionality being rolled out in Twitter. Now that this new functionality is being supported by more and more Twitter clients, I think its time for an object lesson in how Twitter’s new locational feature (and soon Facebook’s) can be used to engage citizens… Continue reading
-
Command Line GeoTwitter
A few months back I wrote a quick post about tweeting from the command line. With the recent announcement that Twitter’s location feature is starting to go live, I decided to revisit this idea, with an eye toward adding locational information. (I am, at heart, a cheapskate – I could have bought one of the… Continue reading
-
Lots of Gov 2.0 Potential in Twitter Geolocation
So the new Twitter hotness will be the ability to add locational data to individual Tweets – not sure on exactly when this new feature will go live, but it will require someone wishing to add locational data to their tweets to: Explicitly opt in to this feature by changing their Twitter account settings. Utilize… Continue reading
-
Identi.ca Looking Pretty Good!
For those government agencies using Twitter for notification, 311 and other services I’ll bet its been a tough morning. They may want to have a look at Identi.ca – a competing (albeit much smaller) micro-blogging site that even piggybacks on Twitter’s API. I’ve said before that government’s need to spread the love among different social… Continue reading
-
Ten Two Ways To Make Twitter Useful For Government
eWeek Europe has an article up listing 10 ways to make Twitter useful for governments. The time is ripe for such thinking – more and more governments are using Twitter to interact with citizens, and its fitting that governments spend some time thinking about how this tool can be used most effectively. Still, the eWeek… 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 