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 [...]
What happens after open sourcing? Do people from elsewhere actually show up, to ask questions, find bugs, and help out? Six weeks ago, the Federal IT Dashboard was open-sourced. We assisted in that release (see our post) because we strongly believe that open collaboration is the natural path for government software, and because the IT [...]
The U.S. Department of Defense has just released a pretty amazing document: “Open Technology Development: Lessons Learned and Best Practices”. (Warning: if you don’t like reading rave reviews, stop now.) In the words of RedHat’s Gunnar Hellekson: It’s a handbook for using and making open source in the DOD and the US Government, sponsored by [...]
With good reason, government staff require proven, reliable, and safe information technology solutions for their needs. Further, with government IT staff and budgets being cut, government needs to do more with less. Making apps already developed and proven by one government entity (such as a city government) available as open source, can be a great [...]
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Why We’re Building a Civic Commons — And How You Can Be Part of It
Posted on June 1, 2011 by Andrew McLaughlin in Commentary
Walk down any major street in any city in the world and you’ll pass by hundreds of pedestrians — and, let’s be honest, more than a few drivers — typing into smart phones. Each of these individuals holds in one hand more computing power than the entire NASA space operation that delivered men to the moon and back in 1969.