Baltimore
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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… Continue reading
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Great Cities and the Shadow of Teotihuacan
Great cities have always had an influence beyond their borders. This is true not only of contemporary cities like New York, Paris and Beijing but also of ancient cities. The influence of Rome can still be seen today in the form of ancient roadways and aqueducts. But whether exporting engineering or religion like ancient Rome,… Continue reading
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A Tale of Two City Hackathons
I had the pleasure of traveling to Austin, TX last week for the SXSWi festival and to present on civic hacking events in Baltimore and Philadelphia. The presentation I gave can be viewed below. There’s also a storify covering my session here (courtesy of @sam_piroton) I had a lot of fun preparing this presentation as… Continue reading
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Practical Hackathons: Free is not Always Better
This is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts with practical advice for organizing and running hacking events, particularly those focused on building civic apps and using open government data. These posts will lead up to, and (hopefully) follow a talk I’m giving at SWSWi in March discussing the outcome… Continue reading
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Civic Hacking and Unconference Events
This is a busy week in the world of civic hacking and unconferences, with events going on from the Mid-Atlantic to the South Pacific. This Saturday in the Washington DC – Baltimore area, there is Transportation Camp (put on by the good folks at OpenPlans) and CreateBaltimore 2 (put on by the Greater Baltimore Tech… 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
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Do Hackathons and Civic Hacking Matter?
There are lots of smart people asking tough questions about civic hacking and hackathons as the new year begins – a new year that promises to see lots of action on the civic hacking front. I think this is a good thing. The more we examine how civic hackathons work and the more we evaluate… Continue reading
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Five Things Governments Can Do to Encourage Civic Startups
2012 is shaping up to be the “Year of the Civic Startup.” With the growth of the open government movement and more and more governments embracing open data, we see an increasing number of useful civic applications being developed. Every weekend hackathon spawns multiple projects that could potentially live on as a successful venture or… 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 