iPads and voter registration usability →

America’s coolest mayor →

Fostering civic innovation in California →

Great American Hackathon set for Dec. 12-13

Great American Hackathon

Sunlight Labs has joined with Mozilla, Google, Redhat, Fedora, Open Source for America and Code for America to promote the Great American Hackathon. The two-day event, December 12-13, aims to “to solve as many open government problems as we can with as many hackathons across the country as possible.”

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About Luke Fretwell

Luke Fretwell is the founder of GovFresh. Contact him at luke@govfresh.com or connect on LinkedIn or Twitter at @govfresh or @lukefretwell.

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  • Anonymous

    Jed, I take your point, but this was not a post focused on “what to do to prepare for the hurricane.” That would start and end with a focus on emergency supplies, best practices for keeping safe, dray and warm, managing utilities, developing communications and evacuation plans, and a comprehensive list of links to local emergency management organizations and first responders. Obviously, I haven’t done that here. 

  • http://jedsundwall.com/ Jed Sundwall

    I’m not criticizing you, I’m criticizing FEMA. As if Friday, the bulk of their social media messaging was about their social media messaging! This kind of meta-speak is common among many agencies and citizens lose because of it.

  • Anonymous

    Did that change over the weekend? If not, Adamski should hear that feedback.

  • http://jedsundwall.com/ Jed Sundwall

    It got somewhat better (e.g. http://j.mp/p6iGdT, http://j.mp/mZ6XU7 & http://j.mp/oWuAdi). Still, there are artifacts of communication departments that are still used to writing to the press, rather than writing directly to the public. For instance, this tweet http://j.mp/oIZS6w — it points to something kind of like a press release that could have been broken up into a number of pithy, actually useful, tweets throughout the storm. 

    My point is that large organizations are still having a hard time getting to the point. If you have information that you really want to get out, PUT IT ON TWITTER—it will spread from there. It’s a pet peeve of mine when agencies continue to use Twitter to route people to information somewhere else. It’s much better to get the key information onto Twitter first. It’s really hard though.