Civic Innovations

Technology, Government Innovation, and Open Data


  • Open Gov: A Means to and End

    With all of the activity and excitement taking place around the country focused on new Government 2.0 and open government initiatives, its easy for those involved to get lost in the technology. Those of us that love technology and work with it for a living can get lost pretty quickly in the minutia of implementing… Continue reading

  • NYC 311 Gets Skyped, Twittified!

    I’ve seen Tweets all morning coming out of the Personal Democracy Forum Conference about New York City’s 311 service. Looks like NYC 311, in addition to being on the web, is now also on Skype (user name is nyc311) and on Twitter. I’m following @311NYC on Twitter now, and I’ve also added it to my… Continue reading

  • 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

  • Delaware Government on YouTube

    I think it’s great the Delaware Government has an official channel on YouTube, I just can’t find anything to watch on it. The most obvious omission from the Delaware Government YouTube Channel seems to be any coverage of official government business (unless I’m missing something). I want to see committee meetings, legislative and executive hearings,… Continue reading

  • Measuring Gov 2.0 Performance

    If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.” – Lord Kelvin There is a lot of exciting news lately coming from state and local governments about innovative new uses for social networking and Gov 2.0 tools. Even the smallest burgs and hamlets in our fair nation are on Twitter, and even the… Continue reading

  • State of California Twitter Directory

    The State of California has posted a comprehensive Twitter directory listing state agencies and officials (include both federal officials and local officials) that are using Twitter. I’m not aware of any other state that has provided such a comprehensive listing of public sector agencies or officials using Twitter. There are some notable Twitter / Gov… Continue reading

  • Data.gov

    …is here !! 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.