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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 Activity Feeds, Open Government, Open Standards, all, open data, open government | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

OpenBlock: Newspaper Survey

If you’re interested in the OpenBlock “hyper-local news” project, we want your help! Our first goal is to make the OpenBlock software easier to install and use for newspapers in the 25k-100k circulation range.  If you or somebody you know works at such a paper, please take a look at this short survey. The results will help us Read more...
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Future of News & Civic Media @MIT

June 17th I was at MIT to attend the 2010 Future of News and Civic Media Conference. Civic hackers galore. More specifically I was there because of the "Data into Action" panel. Nick Grossman, my boss, was on the panel -- among other things, announcing OpenBlock. What's OpenBlock? In a nutshell, we'll be leading the effort to make the technology behind everyblock.com more accessible to newspapers that don't have a huge web budget. So a local paper could put up maps of "hyperlocal news" - stuff you care about happening in your neighborhood, down to the block level. Read on..

Also posted in Open Standards, all, data, open data, open government, open source | 2 Comments

Held hostage

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 solutions Read more...
Also posted in open data, open source | Tagged | 2 Comments

NYTransitData.org launches

Building on the work that has been taking place on the NY transit data wiki, we’ve just launched a new site, NYTransitData.org, which makes the case for improving New York’s transit system through open data. Check out the introduction or browse the frequently asked questions. Then come back and share your thoughts in the comments. We know Read more...
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Accountability and the top-down nature of open data

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...
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Crowdsourcing and Disinformation

Recently, TOPP Labs embarked on a joint venture with Transportation Alternatives to build a “Candidate Survey” website, showing New York users how their local political candidates responded to a TA survey. TA is going to build the public-facing site, and TOPP is going to build a back-end service that does geographic lookup of candidates based on Read more...
Also posted in Community Involvement, Online Participation | 5 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 Activity Feeds, Launch, Uncategorized, games, open government | Leave a comment

The One Answer You Get From Data

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 Read more...
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