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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 Tagged civic hacking, open data, open government, openmuni 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...
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 Activity Feeds, all, community, data, mta, nyc, open data, transit 2 Comments
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, government, open data, open source 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 Activity Feeds, Online Participation, Open Standards, all, open data, 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...
Also posted in open source 7 Comments
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...
Text-to-voice
On their blog today, Mobile Commons explains how AARP used text-to-voice to mobilize senior citizens around health care reform.
It’s not news that mobile (and particularly phone and sms) are the tech tools that connect with the widest audience, but I’m continually impressed by the way that Mobile Commons has built a platform that makes it Read more...
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...
Join Us @ the Speak Up NY Working Group