Harvard fellow Gene Koo wrote a thought-provoking post last week about how games can be used to bolster civic engagement and democratic participation. He noted two general ways they can be used towards these ends: games for crowdsourcing and games to determine what things people value and how they value them (value discernment). Games for Continue reading
At TOPP we talk a lot about technology promoting open government and civic engagement, but projects may fail to bring about real change if they don’t actively engage government as well. Take Stimulus Watch, a great project which furthers these two goals, but—as Ian points out in his recent post— assumes that politicians will take Continue reading
As much as I am loathe to paraphrase that clichéd Ben Parker quote, I had a nightmare a few nights ago that made me worry about the good work we do here at TOPP Labs. There was nothing specific about it that worried me, but I did have a general sense of foreboding and unease about the tasks that we’re taking on and the responsibilities they entail.
Recently Phil Ashlock and I headed down to DC to participate in TransparencyCamp, a BarCamp event put on by the Sunlight Foundation. We spent two days with ~200 open government and transparency advocates from all sectors — government, non-profit, tech, etc. All in all, it was a pretty amazing event — great people and good Continue reading
I was at a get-together recently where people were asking “how do we sell government on transparency?” The general context was: we don’t like quantity or quality of data the city government is giving us. The idea people offered were things like it’s our data, we paid for it, and it is important for people Continue reading