From the beginning, Civic Commons has been a dynamic community initiative. What began in January 2010 as a simple wiki of open government policies and practices (originally called “OpenMuni”, domains for which were simultaneously and independently obtained by Code for America and OpenPlans), grew into a partnership between the two organizations to support the growing open government technology [...]
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Engagement Commons: A new tool to empower civic engagement
Crossposted on KnightBlog.org With the explosion of open data, we’ve seen a proliferation of civic software aiming to get community information on everything from road closures to restaurant inspections into people’s hands. The apps have great potential for engaging people in improving their communities. But often the people closest to the data — city leaders [...]
Open311 Dashboard: Visualizing the Power of the Platform
The Open311 platform is one of Civic Commons’ core initiatives; it’s an Application Programming Interface (API) and a growing set of software tools that help cities manage service and information requests from citizens. We see it as a core element of an “open” city IT backbone. Open311 is also a rapidly growing, collaborative, open source project [...]
City of Columbus app coming to your phone
The City of Columbus, OH, has just announced a mobile app that combines many of the aspects of Open311 and Open211. More and more cities are building similar information aggregating and issue reporting applications (such as Boston’s Citizens Connect), and we are encouraged to see that smaller companies are able to work with cities on [...]
Founding Organizations
2012: Open Innovation for Government
Posted on January 6, 2012 by Nick Grossman in Commentary, Meta
As we turn the calendar to the new year, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on what we’ve done here at Civic Commons over the past year, what we’ve learned, and where we’re planning on heading next. It’s been a busy year for us. While the Civic Commons initiative began, slowly, as an [...]