The new 311 Mobile App allows citizens to have real-time collaboration with their government. – Mayor Rawlings-Blake The City of Baltimore has a long history of leading the way with 311. In 1996, they were the first city to deploy the 311 short code and unified call center, and in 1999, the city launched CitiStat, [...]
As Hurricane Irene has now passed through the east coast, the most common terms I’ve heard in response sound something like “overhyped” and “underwhelming.” With that lens, however, we risk missing an opportunity to take stock of what I think was a watershed moment in the Gov 2.0 movement.
At the Intelligent Cities Forum, Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs spoke with our own Nick Grossman about Civic Commons, OpenPlans, and the future of cities. Check out the video of the interview below: Intelligent Cities Forum: Nick Grossman from National Building Museum on Vimeo.
OpenSource.com is an interesting and active resource for insights on open source technology in industries ranging from business and law to education and government. Today, they featured a post on Civic Commons and specifically on the marketplace we’re in the process of building and how you can help…
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
One of the recurring questions about app contests and hackathons is to what extent they create sustainable civic projects. The Summer of Smart series seems to take this challenge head on: it offers as an award a shot at a GAFFTA residency, providing not prize money, but a space to work and pursue their projects in the fall. As a Code for America fellow who gets support to be a civic hacker, obviously I love this idea…
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Developing a Lean, Agile Procurement Guide
Posted on September 2, 2011 by Michelle Koeth in Commentary, News
At Code for America, we’re encouraged to release work product often – what the techy entrepreneur crowd terms an iterative, lean, agile development process. The net result forces you to embrace mistakes, rather than be in denial about them. In this way, work product is available, even if it is in an imperfect state, to [...]