Give us the 140-character elevator pitch.

We are a tool, placed in online news and blogs, that promotes open dialogue between citizens and legislators in response to current issues.

What problem does Raise Your Voice solve for government?

By enabling average people to quickly and easily voice their opinions to their elected officials – from the news, when they’re most inspired – officials get a larger sampling and a better, unfiltered understanding of how their constituents feel.

What’s the story behind starting Raise Your Voice?

I conceived Raise Your Voice during the debates on health care reform. As an Emergency Physician, I grew increasingly frustrated watching the town hall meetings, well meaning attempts at open dialogue, were hijacked by special interests and degenerated into shouting matches. It became clear to me that there were too many layers – pundits, interest groups, and media, between people and their elected officials, so I designed Raise Your Voice to give the average citizen direct and easy access. I placed it in online news, because that’s where people are most inspired to act. We got some small funding and launched in November 2011.

What are its key features?

Our main attribute is that, in being placed in online news and blogs, we make ourselves available when people are the most inspired about current issues (who hasn’t yelled at the news?).

Other key features include:

• an address book that includes federal, state, local, and county officials (since all politics is local)
• a “widget configurator” that allows people to generate and download the javascript code to place our button on their sites
• the ability to share their communications throughout their social networks
• we are working on integrating an advocacy platform, so people writing about an issue can see other groups working in their area (i.e. I write about logging and the spotted owl then see links to the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society sites)
• we have a multitude of features we are working on to make interaction easier; all aimed at opening up government.

What are the costs, pricing plans?

We are free.

How can those interested connect with you?

• Dan Busse, 303.330.3461
• Website
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Blog

Source: civicsponsor.com

CivicSponsor wants to change the traditional way we fund our public spaces. Here, its three co-founders outline how their new venture aims to help citizens and public servants think outside the taxpayer box.

Give us the 140-character elevator pitch.

CivicSponsor opens channels in your local government so that you can directly, transparently crowdfund public projects in your community with tax-deductible dollars.

What problems does CivicSponsor solve?

As local governments face massive budget cuts, they leave constituents with only two choices: pay more taxes or get no more projects (likely get cuts). CivicSponsor offers a third option: make elective (not forced) contributions that are earmarked, transparent and audited and that only can be used for new, discrete physical projects. We only work on projects that have no other options: either the local government raises new money, or the projects simply can’t be built. CivicSponsor markets the projects, collects the funds, brings corporate sponsors to the table, and provides the tools to offer transparency and measurement of use of funds in clear terms: square feet of public space built, hours of education funded, etc. Our first project is live on our site at www.civicsponsor.org, where we are raising the necessary funds to build athletic facilities at four middle schools in East San Jose.

What are its key features?

We work with the governments directly. Folks can raise money on other platforms; there are plenty around. But none of the others are officially connected with local government. That makes all the difference when you need to offer a tax deduction (we’re for profit) and you need the funds to be earmarked for specific projects. You can’t simply hand funds to government and tell them how to spend it; general fund contributions won’t work that way. You need governments on board from the start, and we know how to close them. Also, we have a corporate sales function that brings big companies on board with these projects in visible, positive public/private partnerships. Companies are more and more realizing the power that investing in their community can have for recruiting, sales, marketing and other efforts. We sell these projects not as philanthropy, but as crucial community outreach that affects the bottom line in a number of ways. No other site does all of the above.

What’s the story behind starting CivicSponsor?

Our three co-founders had been thinking individually about how to save our home towns ever since the recession hit in 2008. Local governments control the public assets we interact with on a daily basis: the park next door, the school our children attend, the streets we bike on. And as grants and subsidies dry up at the federal and state level, the projects that get cut tend to be the local ones, the ones we see and touch and use every day. It didn’t seem appropriate to stand by and watch this happen, so we put together a plan to bring new, private sector dollars to public projects. We knew that to get more money from individuals and businesses, we needed to offer something more, and it turned out that folks we

Source: GovHub

When no one in Nick Gaines’ UC Berkeley freshman political science class could answer the question “Who is your state senator?,” he tuned in, dropped out and started GovHub with co-founder Adam Becker. Here, Becker shares more about their pursuit of the American dream and how they want to help citizens better engage with their elected officials.

Give us the 140-character elevator pitch.

GovHub provides a personalized platform for citizens to learn about and interact with their officials in each level of government.

What problems does GovHub solve?

For government officials:

• Lack of name recognition
• Antiquated, costly public opinion polls
• Inefficient methods for communicating with their constituents

For citizens:

• Hard to actually find who represents you in each level of government (to find out who my city councilperson is, I have to click through about ten pages on my city’s website, including a 2mb PDF file)
• Once you know who represents you, no good way to see what they’re doing in office
• Communication with representatives often feels futile and is hard to get a personalized response from

What are its key features?

• Enter your address and see the officials that represent you at each level of government.
• See their profiles, voting records, social media updates.
• Interact with them on our discussion board, which uses crowdsourced moderation to determine the issues that are most important to an official’s constituents. (We have Kriss Worthington from the Berkeley City Council doing our first Q+A on April 12th.)

…and some really neat things planned for the future.

What are the costs, pricing plans?

GovHub will always be free for its users. In the future we plan to charge government officials (and candidates) for the different services that can connect them to their constituents.

How can those interested connect with you?

• Website
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Email: contact@mygovhub.org

SF Mayor Ed Lee and Chief Innovation Officer Jay Nath with SF Taxi & Mass Communication Challenge attendees (Photo: Mix & Stir Studio)

Last February, officials from San Francisco collaborated with the California College of the Arts and Mix & Stir Studio for the SF Taxi & Mass Communication Challenge, a 24-hour “unhackathon” focused on “design-driven technology solutions to real world problems.” SF Chief Innovation Officer Jay Nath and Mix & Stir’s Christopher Ireland share their thoughts on building a hackathon that incorporated design thinking and “learning about customers from the start.”

Why focus on taxis for a hackathon?

Christopher Ireland: From CCA’s and participants perspective, this is a real problem – and one they experience regularly. They directly benefit from its solution.

Jay Nath: This is a long standing issue for our residents and one that we thought could benefit from design thinking.

How did the idea for this transpire?

CI: Again from CCA and Mix & Stir perspective, we are seeking real problems or “pain points” that can be solved through collaborations between designers, technologists and business experts. The city’s willingness to share data sets, to move quickly and decisively, and to provide background and expert contacts was key for us.

JN: We had been in conversations with CCA and Mix & Stir about the idea of a civic innovation lab. This transformed into a discussion about applying design thinking to civic challenges which led to our thinking of specific issues like the taxi one to test out our theories.

What role did SF play in the event and why?

JN: We worked closely with CCA and Mix & Stir on how to ensure that we had the right stakeholders in the room. That meant getting taxi drivers, dispatchers, our taxi director, etc., on a panel and then all day Saturday as resources for teams. We also had city leadership including our mayor, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Director Ed Reiskin and Supervisor Scott Weiner attend to show support.

What was successful about the event and what lessons did you learn?

CI: For Mix & Stir, the event was a success because SF gained useful, viable ideas; our participants experienced the value of cross-discipline collaboration; everyone saw the importance of design to creating and communicating the solution, and we reaffirmed the importance of listening to and learning about customers from the start. For CCA, all of the above holds, but they would also add that sharing their facilities, faculty and student talent is in line with their strategic mission to support the SF community.

JN: We transformed many city staff into believers of the power of design thinking and how multidisciplinary teams can create new ideas and solutions. With 10 teams, we saw novel ideas that will help shape the direction the City takes to move from these solutions to incubating and productizing.

What are the next steps? How are you going to build on this?

CI:: For Mix & Stir, we first want to fully document the ideas and help the city implement the ones it can. This can be as minimal as gathering and providing work files, or we could incubate 1-2 of the ideas at CCA this summer to test it in a real world setting. We would love to work on another challenge for the City in the future as well.

JN: We are working with SFMTA and Mix & Stir to look at how to take the best ideas and bring them to life. We have some interesting ideas that we will be sharing as we make progress.

SF Mayor Ed Lee discusses the event in this interview with TechCrunch’s Eric Eldon:

The right to vote is being chiseled away by voter ID laws that require voters to show government-issued photo ID in order to vote.

In December, the Department of Justice blocked South Carolina’s voter ID law on the grounds it would make it harder for minorities to vote in violation of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Mississippi and Texas voting ID laws also must be pre-cleared but Texas is not waiting. The Lone Star State filed a federal lawsuit in an effort to speed up a decision.

Strict photo ID requirements will be in place in at least five states – Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Tennessee and Wisconsin — In November. With Election Day less than nine months away, voters without an official photo ID cannot wait for the challenges to play out at the Justice Department and in the courts.

In Wisconsin, for instance, voters must navigate “The 4 Proofs.”

I am a founding member of the Election Protection Coalition. Still, looking at the infographic makes my head hurt. More worrisome, it discourages voters from completing the application process. So I presented the problem of TMI (read: disenfranchisement by design) at Random Hacks of Kindness and the Hackathon for Social Good. Citizen programmers developed solutions to quickly provide voters with information on how to get a voter ID.

During Social Week Washington, DC, I gave a demo of the Cost of Freedom web-based app developed by Kin Lane, API Evangelist for CityGrid.

Users in Wisconsin can forget about “The 4 Proofs.” Instead, in four clicks or less, they will be able to access information about the state’s voter ID requirements, how to obtain a certified copy of their birth certificate (the document that’s typically produced to establish one’s identity), and the location, hours and directions to the Office of Vital Records using public transit.

I also gave a live demo of the Cost of Freedom text-based app developed by Jack Aboutboul, Twilio’s API Evangelist. Twilio is making an in-contribution of text message services to promote voter education.

To commemorate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we plan to launch the Cost of Freedom App on April 4, 2012.

I will post regular updates about the Cost of Freedom Project and other initiatives that are using civic innovation to protect the right to vote. The conversation about voter ID also gives us an opportunity to raise awareness about disruptive technologies in the public sector beyond election administration.

For more information, please visit us at Facebook.com/CostofFreedom. You can sign up to receive notice when the Cost of Freedom App is launched.

Video:

Honolulu Chief Information Officer Gordon Bruce and Deputy CIO Forest Frizzell discuss the the app here.

For questions or more information, contact Janelle Kessler at janelle.kessler@sfgov.org.

From the RFP:

The 311 Customer Service Center seeks solution strategies and pricing schedules for Mobile and Web self service enhancements complying with the Open311 specification. The solution will provide public access to the City’s CRM application using the Open311 standard via an end-to-end connection from the web and mobile clients. City expects to license an existing software system, with defined enhancements to that system during the implementation.

RFP:

City and County of San Francisco Request for Proposals for Open311 to Lagan CRM integration

Addendum:

City and County of San Francisco Request for Proposals for Open311 to Lagan CRM integration

• App of the Year
• Best Transit App
• Best 311 App
• Best Emergency Management App
• Best Social Services App

Every day, tech-minded citizens across the country are doing good by their communities, literally geeking out about how they can help re-define the relationship government has with its citizens, using technology as a democratic tool to collaboratively empower both.

So much is happening in the civic technology community – website redesigns, new websites, open data initiatives, apps, camps, developer contests, hackathons and more – it’s hard to get a perspective on or truly appreciate the collective work of these dot-dogooders both inside and outside government.

That’s why we created the 2011 GovFresh Awards.

It’s time to recognize and honor all that’s been accomplished this year.

It’s time to say thank you.

Here are the categories. Start entering and start voting.

• City of the Year
• Public Servant of the Year
• Citizen of the Year
• App of the Year
• Best Government/Citizen Collaboration
• Best Use of Open Source
• Best Open and Participatory Budgeting Initiative
• Best Open Government Policy
• Best Open Data Platform
• Best Civic Hackathon
• Best Civic Start-up
• Best Use of Social Media
• Best Use of Social Media for Emergency Management
• Best Transit App
• Best 311 App
• Best Emergency Management App
• Best Social Services App