I just left a talk by Aneesh Chopra at the National Civic Summit, talking about open government. One of the examples he talked about was the opening up of federal IT budget data, and specifically Veterans Affairs. The VA CIO gave the organization mostly failing grades on its initiatives — which is to say, they Read more…

In a previous post I said there is “no one answer about what you will get out of this information”. This is probably true for data generally. But it’s not how a lot of people get interested in open government. For instance: the TIF data I noted in that previous post. Many of the people Read more…

I’ve been having some discussions with people at the Chicago Open Government group, talking about data openness. One common complaint all around is about data exported as PDFs. The particular topic we were discussing was TIFs. TIFs (Tax Increment Financing) are something a city can use to try to improve a neighborhood, and fund the Read more…

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 Read more…

There are a number of sites now that invite “participation” by proposing or collecting ideas and having the “public” vote on those ideas. The supposition here is that there is a politician somewhere just desperate to base decisions not on their own belief and intuition, not even on general surveys of public opinion, but to Read more…

Hello and welcome to the Civic Hacker. How do we change the world for the better, using technology? We don’t know, but we won’t let that stop us from talking about it. That’s what we’ll be talking about on this blog. “We” is the members of The Open Planning Project (TOPP), and the TOPP Labs Read more…