Yesterday morning Nick Grossman and I attended a developers’ meeting at the NYC Department of Transportation to brainstorm some ideas to better enhance the open data movement at the agency. The room was very well-balanced in terms of attendance between developers and DOT officials, and there were some interesting requests from the development/programming community. Real-time Continue reading
Last month, we hosted a one-day workshop with Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer‘s office called Speak Up, New York. The purpose of the event was to bring together NYC community groups and “civic hackers” to discuss how community groups are using technology to organize and engage. With a keynote from Deputy US CTO for Open Continue reading
Pioneering an open data policy on the government level is not the easiest initiative without support, according to a recent study by the Open Society Institute. It takes various levels of negotiations among parties of the public, elected officials and “civic hackers”. Furthermore, some government administrations are more risk adverse than others, unsure on how to proceed from being closed to being open in the most cost-effective manner. Most seek to replicate best practices from successful initiatives and improve on others through news stories and conferences, but never some thing tangible; a resource guide, such as our own OpenMuni wiki (still in development), would’ve been more purposeful in understanding the processes of unlocking accessible and quality data.
Localocracy has a nice way of expanding into new communities. They avoid the “tumbleweeds” problem by building support for the initiative before it starts, in a kickstarter-ish sort of way. This is, of course, not a new idea, but I think Localocracy does a nice job of executing on it. E-Democracy has long used a Continue reading
Last night at an event here at OpenPlans, I spent a few minutes talking to Boštjan “Bos” Špetic, the founder of a web startup called Zemanta (a tool for finding related content to blog posts — for writers as well as readers). Most of Bos’ team is based in Slovenia, where he is from. We Continue reading