Jennifer Pahlka — founder of one of Civic Commons’ founding partners, Code for America — gave a talk at the Future of Web Apps conference in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, entitled “The Next Disruption: The Opportunity for Civic Startups.” The keynote, embedded below, outlined how there is a huge opportunity in the government [...]

U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra proposed 10 Principles for Improving Federal Transparency to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. We felt they were smart, so we’re reposting it below, as good advice to all levels of government.

As part of the Open Government Partnership, the Transparency & Accountability Initiative recently published a new report on current best practices and the practical steps for opening government. The report details the state of the art in transparency, accountability and citizen participation across 15 areas of governance, ranging from broad categories such as access to [...]

Stepping into a big room, no matter how familiar it is, and beginning to connect up our tools, review our program, and execute, is always mixed with a little anxiety. It’s then that we take a deep breath and imagine the moment that motivated us to get out and perform today; the vision of scores [...]

With more and more civic data becoming available and accessible, the challenge grows for policy makers and citizens to leverage that data for better decision-making. It is often difficult to understand context and perform analysis. “Weave”, however, helps. A web-based data visualization tool, Weave enables users to explore, analyze, visualize and disseminate data online from [...]

For the past three months, developers from across the country have been working with community partners to create mobile apps that will help low-income Americans improve their lives. Hosted by One Economy, the Applications for Good competition challenged developers to think about how technology can improve education, employment, health and finances. We were thrilled to [...]

Last week, Andrew McLaughlin presented at the Personal Democracy Forum — a conference exploring and analyzing technology’s impact on politics and government — why and how we’re building a Civic Commons. Video from Andrew’s talk was posted online; check it out below:

The Wall Street Journal recently featured the San Ramon Fire Department’s innovative mobile app, which enables citizen participation in emergency situations. Their app, “Fire Department,” allows people trained in CPR to sign up to receive text messages when someone nearby is suffering cardiac arrest, and then they can then use the app to map the [...]

Open Gov West, which took place earlier this month in Portland, Oregon, was by all accounts a success. It was full of passionate innovators, both inside and outside of government, and from all over: people who know that government can’t just be about keeping the lights on and are instead doing the hard work of [...]