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and civic issues

The State of Open Government

What’s the state of the open government movement? What are the good examples and where is more attention needed? This overview goes through many of the open government initiatives that have been formalized as official government policies and looks to see what they say about the overall state of open government. Data.gov just recently had it’s Read more...
Posted in Activity Feeds, Online Participation, Open Standards, all, open data, open government, open source | 3 Comments

Cities Powered by Open Source

February 9th Update: This post originally limited focus on the declaration of “equal” within these three cities open source policies, but I have expanded to also cover the issue of  defining “open source” and stipulating open source licensing for code developed in-house. San Francisco recently established a new policy requiring open source software to be considered Read more...
Posted in open government, open source | 7 Comments

Wanted: Volunteer Web Developer for NYC Parks Project

The Open Planning Project is partnering with the PenTales Storytelling Projects to develop an interactive web app for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. The application will serve as an interactive platform for New Yorkers of all ages to share and collaborate on stories they have produced through hand-writing, digital-writing, photography, moving Read more...
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NYC BigApps Meetup and DevCamp

Last week the first NYC BigApps meetup was held at our office and later this month on November 21st we’ll also serve as the venue for the NYC BigApps DevCamp (please RSVP). The meetup last week was a good opportunity for app developers to learn more about the process and have a chance to talk to Read more...
Posted in data, nyc, open government | 1 Comment

Civic Hacking @ The Great American Hackathon

Join us on December 12th as we host an NYC event for Sunlight Labs’ Great American Hackathon. We’ll be working a handful of projects, including CivicDB, FixMyStreet (Django), and the Local Representative Lookup.  If you’re interested in any of those, please come join us.  If you want to work on something else, please also come join Read more...
Posted in events, open government | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Root, Branches, and Fruit of Government as an Open Platform

Tim O’Reilly often describes the government as a platform, John Geraci provided us with the The Four Pillars of an Open Civic System, and Micah Sifry offered the Three Branches of We.gov. Here I present The Root, Branches, and Fruit of Government as an Open Platform. The recent Gov 2.0 Summit was primarily focused around “Government Read more...
Posted in Online Participation, Open Standards, Platforms, data, open government | 7 Comments

Help open the Big Apple

Delicious data inside. Photo by Anabadili via Flickr. The effort to open municipal data is an initiative with momentum. Inspired in part by the transparency mandate on the federal level that gave us the first ever White House CIO and data.gov, cities across the country are opening up. One city in particular set the scene Read more...
Posted in Uncategorized, open government | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Farm to Market

Aquifers Feed Community Development Beyond the Garden Healthy civic engagement is often based around an emergent collective influence, a momentum from the coalescence of many individuals’ activity. As developers of civic software this is a concept we think of often and try to embrace, especially within the context of a dense urban environment. Such environments Read more...
Posted in Activity Feeds, Community Involvement, open government | 2 Comments