After working in San Francisco first for Obama for America and then as part of Code for America, Catherine Bracy shares a political technologist's view of Silicon Valley's sometimes staggering inequality. Here's her talk from Personal Democracy Forum 2013, "What Techies Need to Know About Politics:"

The city and county of San Francisco has just hired Marc Yves Touitou as its new chief information officer, Mayor Ed Lee's office announced Thursday. Touitou comes from the corporate world. He was previously the senior ... Read More

The San Francisco Mayor's Office of Civic Innovation is seeking applicants for a new fellowship, the Mayor's Innovation Fellowship. The program is inspired by the White House Presidential Innovation Fellowship program, the city announced in a blog post. In that program, launched last year, technologists worked with federal officials for a period of months on technology projects like a unified homepage for access to federal services or another project to make it easier for small businesses to compete for select government business. Read More

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee is expected to announce today that his city's restaurant inspection data will begin to appear on Yelp, the business listings service. Also included in the announcement, expected at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C., is that Yelp, in conjunction with city technologists in San Francisco and New York, NY, have created what they hope will become a de-facto standard for restaurant inspection data. Called Local Inspector Value-Entry Specification, or LIVES, the hope is that this specification will make restaurant inspection information easy for developers to handle and, as a result, more ubiquitous on the web. Read More

San Francisco plans to hire a chief data officer under new legislation announced Monday by San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee.

At an event Monday morning at the Hatchery, a co-working space in San Francisco, Lee said that the changes in the city's open data legislation followed best practices established in New York City and Chicago, and proposed by the Sunlight Foundation*. While Chief Innovation Officer Jay Nath helps to promote open data and other technology projects externally, he said, "we need somebody on the inside to get [city departments] on a higher level of sharing their data."

San Francisco's Mayor Ed Lee announced a new "Mayor's Innovation Fellowship Program" late Thursday afternoon, saying that his office was inspired by the White House's example. Read More