Our blog about technology
and civic issues

NYC DOT Seeks Developer Feedback

A screenshot on traffic conditions in Lower Manhattan at 3:30 PM. (Google Maps for Android) 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 Read more...
Also posted in all, transit, transportation | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Study: A Three-Tier System, Utility & Collab for Open Data

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.
Also posted in Open Government, Open Standards, all, open data, open government | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Wanted: Open Government Checklist

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 got Read more...
Also posted in all, open government | Tagged , | Leave a comment

MTA Continues to Open Its Doors

A screenshot from NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications' (DoITT) NYCityMap showing subway entrances/exits and their intersections (green globe), subway station, and the lines serving that station. The MTA recently released a new dataset with exact latitude and longitude coordinates of station entrances and exits. This was a highly requested dataset for many transit developers Read more...
Also posted in all, community, data, mta, nyc, open data, open government, transit | 2 Comments

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...
Also posted in Online Participation, Open Standards, all, open data, open government, open source | 3 Comments

Community Almanac Redesign

We’re very excited about the new version of the Orton Family Foundation’s Community Almanac that we’ve been working on at TOPP Labs. In this post I’ll share some of the design decisions that went into that project and some of the reasons why things have changed.
Also posted in Community Involvement, Online Participation | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Senatepedia: By Joe Citizen, for Joe Citizen

My first session was facilitated by Karen Adams, who works in Senate Tech Services. Karen came with a kernel of an idea for a 'NY Senatepedia wiki'...a place where people could explain Senate jargon, document the histories of different legal actions, and connect items with related information. A Senatepedia has a ton of merit. It would facilitate peer-to-peer learning between private citizens. It would put in plain view the machinery of Read more...
Also posted in Launch, Uncategorized, games, government, open government | Leave a comment

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...
Also posted in Community Involvement, open government | 2 Comments