Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: What does "civic technology" look like as a new subset of the software industry — a collection of startups that challenges existing heavyweights in government technology, or creates completely different tools? The Code for America Accelerator program invests seed money, time, and free food into a few new companies to find out. It's accepting applicants for its second year of operation. First-year participants tell Sam Roudman why they feel their year in Code for America's San Francisco headquarters was time well spent. Read More

Education entrepreneurs like Udacity's Sebastian Thrun and San Jose State President Mohammed Qayoumi say that they can improve California's suffering higher education system with "massively online open courses," the much-hyped system that revolves around lectures delivered through online video. Advocates say the University of California and state universities need "disruption" — pitting them against faculty who say that cure would be worse than the disease. Read More

Just opening up a city’s data doesn’t make it decipherable. And just because an app wins a prize at a civic hackathon doesn’t guarantee it’s going to find an audience, or become useful for the public. In response to the customary criticisms of civic hackathons and app contests, those running NYC BigApps, an app contest centered on utilizing civic data now in its fourth(!) year have reconfigured their contest this time around to guide entrant projects towards maximum social impact. Read More

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: Pulling itself out from under the weight of America's economic downturn, Kansas City has done what a handful of other cities have also done in recent years: Hired a "chief innovation officer" responsible for ushering in a leaner, modernized city administration. The broad strokes are the same, but looking at Kansas City shows that "innovation" means different things in different cities. Read More

A new report from the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA highlights improvements the MTA can make to ensure its data is easier to understand and use both internally and externally, and shows how data visualizations might be more useful than endless rows of spreadsheet cells. “This is a really prescient time to have this discussion just because we’re starting to get big data flowing in from the agencies,” says William Henderson, executive director of PCAC. “And decisions have to be made about what to do with it.” Read More

Since last year New York City has tested ways to update its increasingly disused (but revenue producing) infrastructure of over 11 thousand payphones. But the city’s experiments with touch screens and free wifi seem tame in comparison to what designers, architects, and students showed off at the demo day for the city’s Reinvent Payphones design challenge, last Tuesday. Read More

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: With around 8,000 full time students, the Saanich School District, north of Victoria, B.C., is not what anyone would call large. This hasn’t stopped its IT team from pursuing the ambitious goal of developing an open-source system for student records, openStudent. District officials believe openStudent could expand to cover all 600,000 students in British Columbia, and many more in the United States, at one-tenth the price of a commercial system. Read More

Public meetings and focus groups aren’t the only tools at the disposal of planners and communities. For help, some cities are looking to a game. As Boston and Detroit did before them, planners in Philadelphia have turned to an online game called Community PlanIt, developed by the Engagement Game Lab at Emerson College, to augment their planning process. Emerson researchers and city planners say it's working: The games are bringing more people into city planning than would otherwise be there, and a more diverse group of participants. Here's when they say it's worked, how it works, and a little bit about why. One hint: Yes, Community PlanIt has in-game rewards, but those aren't the real incentives — in-game currency is a way of tracking and understanding progress. People play to help improve their communities, researchers say. Read More