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How government can share and re-purpose open source civic software

Luke Fretwell — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:32:09 +0000

Civic Commons Director Nick Grossman and 2011 Code for America Fellow Jeremy Canfield give an overview of the new Civic Commons Marketplace, a repository and apps showcase for open source civic and government development projects. The marketplace launched in December.

Video:

A city as a computing platform

Luke Fretwell — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:00:22 +0000

Temple University Director of the Center for Design+Innovation Youngjin Yoo has an excellent “A city as a computing platform” talk from TEDxPhilly held November 8, 2011.

Open source government

Luke Fretwell — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:25:14 +0000

San Francisco Director of Innovation Jay Nath’s TEDxSoMa talk from earlier this year:

Presentation slides:

Open Source Government – TEDxSoMa

View more presentations from Jay Nath

Build a better civic hackathon: lessons from Education Hack Day

Luke Fretwell — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 04:06:56 +0000

ShineOn Storytelling created an excellent video overview of Education Hack Day, held November 12 and 13 in Baltimore (see also a deep-dive overview and list of winners at Startup Baltimore).

For those of you organizing civic hackathons, what’s important to note is that this was a collaborative effort between teachers and developers. Teachers outlined their problems. Developers addressed them.

Too many civic hackathons focus on developer vanity projects that don’t address real technology issues governments face. Government must be proactive in organizing and sharing their needs and collaborate with civic-minded developers during hackathons like Education Hack Day to get these problems addressed. Developers need to focus on projects that make a difference and provide sustainable technology solutions.

For related discussions on this, see Alex Howard’s “Everyone jumped on the app contest bandwagon. Now what?” and Andy Oram’s “App outreach and sustainability: lessons learned by Portland, Oregon.”

Video:

(Thumbnail photo by Mark Headd)

Scaling the open data ecosystem

Luke Fretwell — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:30:15 +0000

Open Knowledge Foundation co-founder Rufus Pollock discusses his ideas on scaling an open data ecosystem.

Excerpt:

In developing this open data ecosystem there are three key things are needed: material, tools and people. This is a key point: open information without tools and communities to utilise it is not enough, after all, openness isn’t an end itself – open material has no value if it isn’t used. We need therefore to have widely available the capabilities for utilising open material, for processing, analysing and sharing it, especially on a large scale. Relevant tools need to be freely and openly available and the related infrastructure — after all tools need somewhere to run, and data needs somewhere to be stored — should be capable of effective deployment by distributed communities.

Video:

13 ways citizen developers are coding a better America

Luke Fretwell — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:25:21 +0000

Code for America has published videos of CfA Fellows demoing their apps during the Code for America Summit held October 13-14 in San Francisco.

John Mertens – Art Mapper

Erik Michaels-Ober – Adopt-a-Hydrant

Anna Bloom – Change By Us

Aaron Ogle – ReRoute.it

Jeremy Canfield – Open311 Dashboard

Max Ogden – DataCouch

Michelle Koeth – Civic Commons Legal Guide

Karla Macedo – Iconathon

Chach Sikes – CityGroups

Scott Silverman – ClassTalk

Matt Lewis – JobOps

Ryan Resella – TechnoFinder

Joel Mahoney – DiscoverBPS

SF Mayor Ed Lee at 2011 Web 2.0 Summit (VIDEO)

Luke Fretwell — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 20:59:45 +0000

O’Reilly Media’s Alex Howard interviewed San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee this week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Lee discusses open source, open data, apps, mobile and bridging the digital divide.

GovFreshTV: Q&A with Chicago CTO John Tolva

Luke Fretwell — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:00:53 +0000

During last week’s Code for America 2011 Summit, I sat down with Chicago Chief Technology Officer John Tolva and asked him about his current IT initiatives, challenges and lessons learned.

Video:

Code for America: ‘In our own words’ (VIDEO)

Luke Fretwell — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 20:16:23 +0000

Excellent Code for America video featuring the 2011 fellows discussing their work and CfA mission.

This week on Gov2 TV: OGP, ‘open government is dead’ debate

Luke Fretwell — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 22:13:52 +0000

This week’s Gov2 TV discusses the international Open Government Partnership, the “open gov is dead” debate and the latest government 2.0 news and trends with O’Reilly Media Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent Alex Howard and host Walter Schwabe.