Right now the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) is hosting a Civic Data Challenge. This challenge hopes to “turn the raw data of ‘civic health’ into beautiful, useful applications and visualizations, enabling communities to be better understood and made to thrive.” Judges, that’s me, will evaluate entries based on the quality of the analysis andRead… Read more »
On Monday April 30, 2012, Oakland City Council reviewed an open data policy initiative put forth by city councilmember of the 4th District and Oakland native, Libby Schaff. The open data policy agenda report composed by policy analyst Bruce Stoffmacher, proposes to make raw data sets accessible to the public on a new city dataRead… Read more »
This post is the first in an upcoming series of posts about civic startups. What’s a civic startup? Find out. Code for America recently launched a civic startup accelerator to help promote and “turbo charge” civic startups. We’re accepting applications for the accelerator now through June 1. Apply: codeforamerica.org/accelerator Jonathan Wegener is founder/CEO of Timehop.com,Read… Read more »
Code for America recently launched Engagement Commons to bring together information and solutions from across the country on innovative new strategies for government engagement with citizens. The landscape of tools and strategies for engaging citizens is changing rapidly, as more and more governments implement new ways for citizens to make their voices heard in theRead… Read more »
Sometimes, a word can’t do justice to an idea. To some, the word “hackathon” means a somewhat narrow, one-dimensional kind of event that attracts software developers cloistered away to tinker with new APIs – fueled by pizza, Red Bull, and the incessant beats of the very latest dubstep jam. And while hackathons of all varietiesRead… Read more »
Taking on the task of building apps to enhance a citizen’s ability to engage in the civic space is a complex undertaking. How do we successfully translate authentic civic engagement to the web? How do we move toward a common understanding of what civic engagement even means? Finding definitive metrics to gauge the success ofRead… Read more »
People aren’t just watching, talking, and tweeting about civic technology–they are acting! Over the week of February 25 – May 4, passionate citizens around the country came together to “Code Across America.” Eight events were organized by the 2012 Fellows and eight events were organized by civic leaders in other cities as part of theRead… Read more »
Last week in Honolulu, the Mayor got on a bus. And while this may seem like a small thing, it’s just the latest example of how mayors and municipal leaders are using the weight of their offices to advance the agenda of open government. Mayors are not often known for their prowess at writing code.Read… Read more »
As organizations like Code for America encourage government transparency and the concept of Open Data at multiple levels of government in the US, I think it’s useful for us to take a look at how Open Data is handled in other countries. Given my non-existent skills in other languages and my distrust of Google Translate,Read… Read more »
CfA Salon is a new casual speaker series hosted by Code for America. This monthly event invites the community in for a thought-provoking, intimate discussion with leaders in government and technology. These leaders will share their vision for where we are and where we’re heading as a society. Code for America will share a bitRead… Read more »