I am involved with the Gov 2.0 movement because I believe it will bring important change to calcified and inefficient governmental structures. CityCampSF, an unconference held yesterday in San Francisco, will be a success if real actions stem from the event discussions and connections. I got two action items from the event that I intend to follow up on:
Fighting Blight with Civic Apps
In a great small group discussion with officials from the Department of Public Works and the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services, I learned more about how the City addresses graffiti tagging. I want to help educate folks how to use Open311 and apps like CitySourced and SeeClickFix to photograph, geotag and report graffiti tags, and to create more efficient structures for empowering volunteers to paint over tags on private property. I learned about current and planned graffiti tagging abatement efforts from DPW’s Greg Crump, and Greg and I plan to create a wiki to document current processes and work on technical and process reforms. I’m also hoping to get on the agenda of the Graffiti Advisory Board next month to talk about civic apps and innovations in graffiti tagging prevention and abatement, with the goal of convening a train-the-trainers session with neighborhood leaders on how to better fight blight in their communities using new technologies.
Mapping and Promoting Civic Treasures
In a session on social media for civic engagement, I learned about theartaround.us, a project by Laurenellen McCann that aims to be a Yelp for art, and Green Map, a global effort to map cultural resources, as I presented on using location-based services to promotepublic art and open space. There was a lot of synergy around the topic, as we discussed mapping civic resources from temporary art installations from groups like Black Rock City (the Burning Man producers) to community gardens. I hope to use the CityCampSF platform to start soliciting and creating civic maps and to collect and promote those that already exist.
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I know a lot of work was involved in planning.
Any advice for others? How did you
-Get word out
-Get space
-Facilitate
-Planning followup
Adriel – thanks for all your work in the Gov 2.0 space and some great action items which unconferences all need (i.e. great dialogue – now what). To optimize our collective work, lets take the ChangeCamp actions, create an overall action plan and have the community work collectively to crowdsource “solutions”. Looking forward to more exciting ideas and work in this space
Cheers
Jury
Definitely want to write about the organizing component. I think getting people aware of an event is the biggest hurdle, really, although the background about getting a space reveals some real problems in how we do things these days in gov. More later. Busy times right now.
I really enjoyed the whole @CityCampSF day. Adriel did a fantastic job of organizing the event and getting a very diverse set of people at the table. The content was engaging, interesting and challenging.
The space worked out really well and the sponsors were great. So was the pizza and early morning yummies.
The ongoing challenge with all great meetings is catalyzing good ideas into concrete action. I am especially grateful for the opportunity to facilitate a group on Gov 2.0/Open Gov. We had a very lively discussion, great feedback for one of my ideas, which is always nice to have a reality check, and finally met some people I’ve only known online.
I’m going to start pushing hard for some demonstration sites/grants which combine the whole framework within the federal grant making system. I have the basics worked out and am getting it down as a proposal.
Loved attending.