One of the most common – and important – ways that citizens interact with their government is through the reporting of non-emergency issues in their neighborhoods. How effectively governments manage these requests for service is critical to fostering stable neighborhoods and confidence in municipal leadership. Since it was first adopted in Baltimore in the mid-1990’s,Read… Read more »
The Department of Health and Human Services is the latest federal agency to tap the creativity of the marketplace by running a contest to find the best products for their emergency preparedness apps. HHS used a tool that is increasingly being relied upon by agencies to find the best mobile solutions, get the work doneRead… Read more »
App contests are a great way to get useful programs for your agency, but there’s something more important which can result from a well-run app competition. Christopher Dorobek of the DorobekINSIDER spoke with Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet and How to Run Apps Contests, about what should be the focus of an appsRead… Read more »
It appears that big developments in local open government stemming from high level planning between major US cities that has been in the works since 2009 could be bearing fruit within the next few months. A partnership of IT executives from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — known asRead… Read more »
Sometimes simply talking about a concept doesn’t do it justice. Often it takes seeing something tangible to drive the point home. While we talk about agile development and more effective use of technology in addressing civic issues, when we see it in practice we begin to see what is actually possible, and understand the powerRead… Read more »
When I wrote in my blog last week that Google Drive’s announcement arrived with a whimper; that was after my initial impression. After working with it for a week, I would like to upgrade my appraisal from cool reception to something just shy of ‘game-changer’… let’s just call it ‘significant’. Why the change? Looking atRead… Read more »
This post has been updated to include Dan Chenok’s contribution Gadi Ben-Yehuda Big Apps Contest Yields New Tools for Residents. The third Big Apps Contest winners were announced last week, and this infographic tells the story of the apps that were submitted. The overall winner of the contest was an app called NYCFacets, which seeksRead… Read more »
Interesting post from Steve Dale – taking a slightly different approach to the use of social tools within the workplace (see ‘social business’ or ‘enterprise 2.0′ ad nauseam) where he focuses instead on the concept of ‘personal knowledge management’. In order to develop a true learning organisation, staff need to be given much more freedomRead… Read more »
I’ve been playing with a new iPad recently – and I love it. The screen resolution on these things literally has to be seen to be believed. I had an original iPad before – the one without a camera – and it was also a wifi only one, without a mobile data plan. The resultRead… Read more »
One of the more potent applications in both Office 365 and Google Apps is their intranet application. Microsoft’s offers TeamSite ─ hosted SharePoint; and Google’s, typical of their imaginative naming conventions ─ “Sites”. These apps differ fundamentally from standard web development environments in two ways. 1) In addition to text and graphics, SharePoint and SitesRead… Read more »