The event will focus on the rise of urban innovators and how entrepreneurs and government can collaborate to further innovation and improve cities.

Panelists:

• David Chiu, President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors
• Logan Green, Co-Founder and CEO of Zimride/ Lyft
• Molly Turner, Director of Public Policy at Airbnb
• Moderated by Peter Hirshberg, Board Chairman of the Gray Area Foundation For The Arts

See a related post on the subject from Tumml co-founders Clara Brenner and Julie Lein here.

The first CivicMeet SF will be held in San Francisco on November 15, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Thirsty Bear.

Space is limited so register now.

Big shout to fellow organizers and Bay Area civic rock stars Alissa Black, Sarah Granger, Marci Harris, Hillary Hartley, Tina Lee and Shannon Spanhake on making this happen.

Be sure to connect with CivicMeet (or start one where you live) on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

If you’d like to help coordinate or host an event, feel free to contact us here.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Check out Kwan Booth’s great Storify wrap-up of the event here:

]]> http://govfresh.com/2012/07/wrapping-up-code-for-oakland-2012/feed/ 0 http://govfresh.com/2012/07/oakland-gets-its-code-on/ http://govfresh.com/2012/07/oakland-gets-its-code-on/#comments Tue, 17 Jul 2012 20:00:17 +0000 Luke Fretwell http://govfresh.com/?p=14785 Code for Oakland will be held July 21 at the Kaiser Center in Oakland, Ca.

Steve Spiker, OpenOakland Brigade Captain and Director of Research & Technology for Urban Strategies Council, discusses Oakland’s open data progress and what attendees can expect from the event.

What’s the state of open data in Oakland?

We’ve done a lot of education with city staff and council members on the need and benefit for open data, and just this week a committee approved a staff report to go to council with two viable options for building an open data platform for Oakland – an internally developed system or an external solution, something like Socrata or Junar. We’re hoping this moves forward smoothly, and we see a new system live before the end of the year – a first for an East Bay city!

In the past the only open data content was provided on our platform at www.infoalamedacounty.org as part of our efforts to democratize data and also provide a system for planners and nonprofits and policymakers to access good public data for decision making and analysis. We’ve made all our data simply downloadable from within the mapping tool.

See also my recent post about this here.

We are also working with Alameda County to plan for and launch their new open data platform also.

How did the idea for Code for Oakland come about? Who’s behind it, and what can attendees expect?

Oakland is a city with all the components to make it an incredibly prominent, productive technology mecca, except for formal city support of this work. A group of local media folks, local technologists, tech/data loving nonprofits and interested city staff got together to provide an event each year where civically engaged residents, developers, media and curious city staff can get together and build or work towards solutions to local issues faced by our community and our city. As with last year we will have a hackathon for the folks who want to create new tools with $5,000 in prizes and some great support packages to help the winners bring their apps to market.

The main organizations supporting this are Urban Strategies Council, Oakland Local, Code for America, the City of Oakland and TechLiminal.

What makes Code For Oakland somewhat unique is the non-hack events. This year we will have sessions for information activism, learning about open data, a chance to build out a permanent record of our great city on a LocalWiki site and a great urban exploration event using ForageCity (an app built by a local gem Youth Radio) where people can use technology, maps to find surplus food in their community.

What long-term plans do you have for Code for Oakland, growing the Oakland open data movement and leveraging this to help the city?

The Code for Oakland organizing committee is eager to move beyond a single event per year, and we hope to build the team’s capacity and the city’s support to allow more frequent events in Oakland.

During the event we will be highlighting work from last year’s event with a discussion on the ways we can support and sustain efforts like this where an app has perhaps little commercial value but a potentially huge community value.

As with most U.S. cities there are dozens of ways that smart technologists and engineers can make a huge impact on how well our cities function, we think this is a worthy challenge and needs our support long term. This was part of the reason we created OpenOakland – a Code for America Brigade focused on supporting local hackers to connect with civic issues and city staff to work together to build tools that transform our city.

There’s also a post on the start of OpenOakland with more info, and to get involved join us here.

Mark Headd has some interesting thoughts on encouraging better participation at civic hackathons, suggesting perhaps a registration fee would drive more reliable participation. For those who will be at SXSW this year, he’s also giving a talk on lessons learned in organizing events such as these.

While you can typically expect up to a fifty percent drop-off rate for any free event that doesn’t require specific attendee contributions, Mark may be onto something.

However, there’s something more happening here, and it’s related to motivation.

It doesn’t matter whether you have 1,000 or 10 people at an event. What matters is having the right people for the right task with a sustainable deliverable that also fosters volunteerism and sense of community. The hackathon itself shouldn’t be where all the work, from scratch to finish, is done. It should be the foundation for bringing what’s happening online, building community through code and celebrating the final product(s).

Areas hackathon organizers must address when considering attendance and meaningful outcomes:

• Don’t mistake quantity for quality. I’ll take five solid designers/developers/writers to build a website or application over 100 with little focus and not taking their civic duty serious.
• Plan ahead, outline objectives, have focus, give ownership, achieve a goal. The hackathon shouldn’t be the end-all, be-all for what happens. If someone has a specific task and sense that their work is going to have sustainable value to the community, they’re more likely to show up.
• Get government involved. Hackathon organizers need to work with government (and vice versa) to understand its needs and how they can support it. Fundamentally, civic activists want to see some sort of appreciation or sense their voice (in this case, their code) is being heard. Government involvement is critical.

If you accomplish the above, you’ll get serious developers taking a brief step away from their startup venture or overwhelming demand for paid work, where they know they can be creative building work that’s meaningful and lasts beyond the lifespan of the weekend. Otherwise, you’re going to get light attendance with outcomes that produce vanity projects with little value celebrated by a core few.

For those interested motivating and incentivizing people beyond manual, rote tasks, Dan Pink’s RSAnimate talk and 2009 TED talk are a must watch, because they applies to civic hackathons, contests and challenges.

Pink’s RSA talk:

Pink’s 2009 TED Talk:

The world’s biggest little city is about to get its code on.

Set for October 15-16 at the Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts in Reno, Nev., Hack4Reno is a 24-hour civic hackathon organized by the Reno Collective and the City of Reno.

We asked organizers from the Reno Collective, Colin Loretz, Don Morrison and Chris Yoder, and City of Reno Web Manager Kristy Fifelski to share why they’re doing Hack4Reno and what’s in store before, during and after the event.

Who’s behind Hack4Reno and who’s it for?

Hack4Reno is a partnership with Reno Collective and the City of Reno to inspire developers, designers and entrepreneurs to build apps, websites or services that help the Reno community grow into a smarter, more engaged city. If you’ve ever wanted to build an app or a website, this is the perfect opportunity to do so while getting a lot of exposure and even win prizes!

What do you want to accomplish short- and long-term with Hack4Reno?

In the short-term, Hack4Reno will help local developers, designers and entrepreneurs to meet one another, learn about what other talent exists in the area and showcase the local talent. We have a wealth of resources in Reno and places like Tahoe, Sparks and Truckee all within 30 minutes but not everyone knows what resources exist or how to access them. The apps that get built at Hack4Reno will help make Reno a more connected place.

Long term, Hack4Reno is about education. We want people to understand what is happening around them in their community and we want them to see what kind of talent exists here. In doing so, we hope to retain and even attract new talent to the area through the creation of new businesses and opportunities around web technology, open government and entrepreneurship.

What are the the pre-hackathon events and why are they important?

We are hosting various Hack4Reno meetups and workshops leading up to the event so that we can prepare everyone for the 24 hour hackathon. This includes classes on various services and open source technologies that can cut the time and cost of development significantly. We see them as a kind of training regime, similar to how you’d train for a marathon. You can’t just show up to a marathon without any training and expect to run all 26.2 miles. These meetups also allow the participants to meet one another, form teams and learn more about open government, open data and learn more about why Hack4Reno is happening and why it is happening specifically in Reno.

How can people connect with Hack4Reno and get involved?

Everything can be found online at www.hack4reno.com or you can follow updates on Twitter at @hack4reno. Thanks to our wonderful sponsors, we have made the event completely free for participants and we want to encourage developers and designers, even if they are from another city, to come out and build something with us!

Watch this video from the organizers:

Photo: CityofReno

Brad Fitch, Congressional Management Foundation

How is it possible, in the 21^st century, that I can Skype with friends in China, keep up with my friends across the country via Facebook and exchange messages with the CEO of a startup I admire on Twitter, but yet when I try to communicate with my members of Congress, it seems like everything I do is swallowed up by the black abyss?

What? Maybe I should try tweeting to Senator Boxer, commenting on Rep. Nancy Pelosi‘s Facebook page or emailing Assemblymember Tom Ammiano? Come on, you’re joking, right? Doesn’t everyone in Congress think the Internet is a series of tubes?

Well, turns out I’m wrong. Not only is Congress up on their social media skills, but according to Brad Fitch, president of the Congressional Management Foundation:

Nearly 2/3 of staff surveyed (64%) think Facebook is an important way to understand constituents’ views and nearly 3/4 (74%) think it is important for communicating their Members’ views.

Fitch talked about how Capitol Hill perceives and uses social media at a #SocialCongress meetup Monday in San Francisco. He had some good news, bad news and interesting perspectives. (The full report will be released on July 26^th.)

Bad news first: staffers agree that email and the Internet have made it easier for citizens to take part in public policy, but nearly 2/3 feel like they’ve reduced the quality of the messages they send, and less than half think that email and the Internet have increased citizen understanding of what actually happens in D.C. In other words, to quote Popvox CEO Marci Harris, “The internet has increased civic participation and lawmaker accountability but has not necessarily led to a more informed constituency.”

Great, now we have uninformed people writing to Congress. How does that possibly help our democracy? Well, as Thomas Jefferson said, “We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.” In 2005, CMF found that “Congress received four times more communications in 2004 than in 1995 – all of the increase from Internet-based communications,” and a 2008 survey by CMF and Zogby found that “43 percent of Americans who had contacted Congress used online methods to do so, more than twice the percentage that had used postal mail or the telephone.”

In this case, the good news and the bad news is kind of a mobius strip: more people are communicating with their elected officials. Those people may not be as well-informed as said elected officials hope them to be, however, the saying “the medium is the message” is more appropriate than ever when talking about the Internet. Senior managers and communications staffers on the Hill across the board said social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were vital to both communicating the Member’s views and understanding what constituents want. The key is doing more than just liking a status update, or leaving one-word comments on a link. To make an impact on your member of Congress, you have to discuss the impact of a bill on your state or district, give a reason for your support or opposition, or tell a story.

Gov 2.0 champion Tim O’Reilly asked the question that was on the minds of all the technologists in the room:

“It’s not just about reaching Congress,” he said, “but can we use technology to make Congress smarter? People in government are ready, they want to figure it out. We have to help them be more responsive, to be the government we wish we had.”

Federal government open source and open government practitioners will convene for a one-day conference, OpenGovDC, June 14 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, DC. Produced by Development Seed and Phase2 Technology, tickets are now on sale for $45.

Federal Communications Commission Managing Director Steven VanRoekel will keynote. Panelists include WordPress/Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg, as well as representatives from the White House, DOE, State, GSA, NASA, FCC and Sunlight Labs. Topics range from open source Web platforms, open data, security and geospatial visualization, among others.

We asked Phase2 CEO Jeff Walpole to share his thoughts on organizing the event, and why he believes open source is important to facilitating open government.

What is OpenGovDC, who should attend and what will be the takeaway?

OpenGovDC is a one day conference to give government technologists an action plan for implementing open source web applications. With the growth in interest and adoption of open source by federal agencies, we wanted to create a forum where the first wave of adopters could share their experience and offer best practices to government technologists exploring the capabilities of open source tools.

OpenGovDC is for:

• Open Government stakeholders who wants to better understand—or build—technical platforms that support agency-level needs.
• People curious about open source tools, like Drupal, Node.js, and WordPress, in the realm of government applications.
• Developers who want to learn about the unique challenges faced by government web practitioners.

What’s your take on the state of open government? What aspects are thriving or need more focus?

I have participated in numerous events this past year that have done an excellent job of setting the stage for the open government movement and open source adoption. In March I was at the NASA Open Source Summit at the Ames Research Center. NASA is releasing recommendations based on input from the Summit this coming week, and we’re excited to have Nick Skytland with the Open Government Initiative at NASA participating in OpenGovDC to discuss these recommendations and how they shape cross agency collaboration for open source technology.

Examples such as this demonstrate that we are leaving the exploration phase and moving very much in the action stage of open government. Many of the obstacles have been identified, so the next year will be about creating solutions to share and leverage resources across agencies. This is a huge opportunity for focus.

What are your long-term goals for OpenGovDC and how will it cultivate a sustainable open government movement?

We’re coordinating OpenGovDC in partnership with Development Seed and right now the priority is to look at how open source tools can be used to advance open government by focusing on how to best share technology across agencies and giving people real life examples of each topic in government.

By combining each session with a technical workshop, participants can walk away with better understanding of how open source has been used successfully so far and develop an action plan for their agency. The more successful implementations there are in the open government movement, the more we can all learn from each other and improve the movement as a whole.

Learn more at www.OpenGovDC.com or register here.

Photo via Wikipedia

New York open government advocates and civic techs will gather this weekend to build on its past and current efforts at OpenGov Camp. The event is this Sunday, June 5, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Register here.

Organizer Noel Hidalgo of Reinvent Albany discusses the event’s objectives and what he hopes will come of it.

What is OpenGovNYC and who should attend?

OpenGov NYC is for the “DO’er,” the entrepreneur, the thinker, the academic AND the government worker. For the past few years, our friends up and down the eastern seaboard and across the NYC metro area AND up in Albany have been doing a great opening the doors of government. In many of these cases, it has been a partnership of participation. This is why we have Reinvent Albany – an advocacy group, Personal Democracy Forum – a network of journalists, and Digital Democracy – an on the ground “do tank”. This event follows in the tradition of creating a safe space for conversation and a platform for collaboration.

Give us your take on what’s happening in NYC open government.

Open government in NYC and in Albany is in a very precious location. No longer is about an experiment, but how to maximize an investment of tax dollars. From the SAGE commission in Albany to NYC’s digital future report, NY’s leaders know that there are smart people who have the knowledge to outline the problems. The real problem is if we have the political will to take on those problems and apply a logical, fiscally responsible solution. The only way to do this is to remove the blinders and openly talk about the problems.

In Albany, Governor Cuomo has a policy playbook filled with program outlines and sample operational structure to create a team that will open NY.

Here in NYC, the Council, the Administration and good government advocates are trying to advance several pieces of legislation that would embolden the great work the city has done and point it in the proper direction for the 21st century. It’s a struggle because some in the Administration get it and some don’t. This isn’t unique to open government; we see the same stubbornness in the advocacy for car-free transportation alternatives.

What do you want attendees to take away from OpenGovNYC and any longer-term objectives?

At OpenGov Camp, attendees will leave knowing that they have friends in and out of government. Our work is too precious for advocates to fight against the system. We want to work hand-in-hand through the tough, confusing and archaic thinking to create a City and state State home to the most innovative ideas, the social entrepreneurs and the “developers”. Together, we can have a double bottom line that helps out “Main Street” and “City Hall”.

Register for OpenGov Camp and follow the latest news on Twitter at @OpenNYforum and the hashtag #OGCamp.

According to Socrata, attendees will learn how to:

• Create a configured and branded Open Data catalog
• Give your constituents a rich, interactive experience for exploring and visualizing data
• Streamline data publishing and make it virtually effortless
• Gain real-time visibility into data access and usage patterns
• Eliminate the need for costly infrastructure and custom development

Details and registration here.