Last week at DrupalCon, representatives from the city of Los Angeles, CivicActions and Acquia shared their development and project management process to begin migrating and consolidating websites across 40 agencies to a single instance using Acquia Cloud Site Factory.
It was an excellent discussion that went a little beyond the basics, and there were a number of questions we didn’t get to, but overall it’s a helpful introduction that includes some great panelist anecdotes.
Michael Flowers shares insights into his time as the former New York City chief analytics officer at the NYC Office of Data Analytics under Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the 2014 Code for America Summit.
San Francisco Chief Data Officer Joy Bonaguro shares her vision for the city’s open data future at the 2014 Code for America Summit.
We’ve recently seen an uptick in venture capital interest around government and civic technology startups, but before we enthusiastically celebrate these investments, we must ask ourselves whether this potential bubble will truly reshape government IT or simply leave us five years from now in the same place we are today.
Code for America’s Catherine Bracy has a great TED Talk on civic hacking and one of America’s greatest civic hackers, Ben Franklin, inspired a brigade of do-good developers across the world.
Internet Renaissance man Baratunde Thurston is the latest tech celebrity to pitch the Code for America fellowship program targeted to developers, designers, researchers, data enthusiasts, urban planners and entrepreneurs who want to make a civic difference.
In the 32,000 trips included in the 5-day sample, rush hour surges, pulses of local traffic, cross-river commutes, and 3 am Sunday morning “Rides of Shame” can be seen throughout Washington, D.C.
On January 22-23, the Institute for the Future will host Connected Citizens, a 24-hour collective forecasting game to “to rethink and reprogram government services for a complex and connected world.”
Citizinvestor co-founder Jordan Raynor discusses the rise of the ‘micro-philanthropist’ and how digital tools are empowering citizens to help crowdfund public projects.
Great video highlighting what a civic hackathon is and how it works via a re-cap of GreenBiz’s recent three-day ‘Hack City.’
I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of a more structured approach to community with respect to the civic technology movement, which is why I picked up Brad Feld’s ‘Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City.’
Great Clay Shirky TED Talk on how distributed version control and “having access to all the source code all of the time” will one day change the way government works.
New York City’s Michael Flowers gives an overview of how the city leverages data analytics to solve problems and better serve citizens.
Great “Connected Empowerment” video featuring San Francisco Chief Innovation Officer Jay Nath and civic action platform, Neighborland.
This past September Vallejo, Ca., began the United States’ first citywide venture in participatory budgeting, allowing residents to directly decide how $3.4 million dollars of public money would be spent.
For those of you interested in starting or joining the civic technology movement where you live, watch Code for America Brigade program director Kevin Curry discuss how designers and developers are doing just this everywhere across the United States.
sf.citi brings out the the tech heavyweights for a new video imagining what civic technology could do for a “smarter San Francisco.”
Great video from the Chicago mayor’s office on their Open 311 deployment.
South Orange, New Jersey, mayor Alex Torpey has a great speech from Personal Democracy Forum 2012, where he discussed how the Internet is changing the way politicians learn, listen and engage with citizens, as well as the changing dynamic of who will seek elected office in the future.
Palo Alto (California) Chief Information Officer Jonathan Reichental shares his vision of the “Digital City” with attendees at the Silicon Valley iOS Developers’ Meetup on May 21, 2012.
This is the first time I’ve heard of Harvard-educated, professional wrestler look-alike and Braddock, Pennsylvania, mayor John Fetterman, featured in this episode of Hulu’s “A Day In The Life” series.
Great TEDxPhilly talk by Code for America Founder and Executive Director Jen Pahlka. Really inspiring to see Jen articulate what’s happening around city and local government beyond the tech talk people like me are so in the weeds on.
I’ve been collecting links (below) from the UK’s Government Digital Service blog for a while wondering when they’ll stop executing their great “beta” work on GOV.UK, but they continue to outdo themselves.
We’ve heard a lot about Drupal and WordPress in government, but not much about the open source platform Joomla. We asked Joomla External Communications Lead Sandra Ordonez to share how government is using it, its key features, how it compares to Drupal and WordPress and what governments are using it.
In January 2011, Michael McDonald and Micah Altman founded the Public Mapping Project and began building the open source platform DistrictBuilder to give citizens more of a say in the redistricting process.
After watching the documentary Hacking Democracy, I started researching how government uses voting technology to conduct elections. That’s how I learned about the work of Open Source Digital Voting Foundation.
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.
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.
San Francisco Director of Innovation Jay Nath’s TEDxSoMa talk from earlier this year:
