A while back I started using Chrome, and it has this clever little feature where if you type in “amazon” and hit tab it will search the Amazon site with Google Search. I’ve always found Amazon’s search to be really poor. I’m not sure what it should be doing, but whatever it is doing it Continue reading
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 Continue reading
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 Continue reading
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 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