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 Read more…
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 Read more…
Tomorrow morning, NYC DOT is inviting developers to come and discuss what transportation data sets they’d like to see opened up. From their invitation: The New York City Department of Transportation needs your help! We want to provide more and more useful information to the traveling public about traffic and transportation. We know we’ve got Read more…
Just got home from the first MTA Developers Unconference. I had the honor of speaking on the panel, which was moderated by Anil Dash and included some really great folks: MTA Chairman Jay Walder, Deputy US CTO for Open Government Beth Noveck, Derek Gotfrid from the NY Times, Anthony Shorris from the Rudin Center, and Read more…
Recently, we’ve been working with a lot of public agencies (mostly in the transportation sector) who are interested in setting up developer conferences or app contests. While we are big fans of both conferences and contests, our main point of advice has been get away from thinking just about conferences & contests, and focus on Read more…
There’s a nice post from David Eaves today on the need for a “MuniForge” — a repository for open source municipal software. Without getting too into the details, I wanted to point out one line that really struck a chord with me, discussing the conundrum that governments find themselves in when procuring proprietary software: …most Read more…
At last night’s PlanningTech workshop, we diagrammed out planning processes to see where the insertion of technology might have been helpful. The processes we looked at ranged from seemingly simple (getting a bike rack installed on your street) to massively complex (advocating for funding for MTA’s capital plan). Keep an eye out for digitized versions Read more…