Civic Hacking
Today, government and public life is being reimagined and reconfigured by a new generation of civic engineers. Only instead of using concrete and steel, they're using data and code. Some come from inside government, where they're opening up public data to outsiders and inviting developers to work with them on new kinds of services and apps. Others aren't waiting for government to act, and they're hacking on the public space using data that they scrape from government sites along with bottom-up data that the public itself generates and shares. Together they're building new ways of identifying problems and solutions, connecting the public and government, and making things work better. Meet the civic hackers.
How to Hack Public Meetings
BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, September 6 2011
A public meeting in Edmonton, Canada. Photo: Mack Male / Flickr Hidden in dusty cabinets and squirreled away in boxes in city halls across the country, the minutes of local government meetings record the civic pulse of ... Read More
Code for America's Chief Geek Says Civic Hackers Should Fix Hackathons Next
BY Nick Judd | Thursday, August 18 2011
Hackathons like the July 30 Hack for Japan event in Tokyo generate excitement and new connections, but how much of that energy is wasted? Photo: Yusuke Kawasaki / Flickr Spending a year in a city hall somewhere, dragging ... Read More
Vivek Kundra's Tips for Smarter Government
BY Nick Judd | Thursday, July 14 2011
At the Sunlight Foundation* blog, Daniel Schuman recaps ten principles for improving federal transparency that federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra delivered during testimony before a House Committee on ... Read More
Chicago CTO Says Senior Municipal Staff are Changing the Way Cities Work
BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, June 28 2011
Chicago at night. Photo: Rhys Asplundh / Flickr Mayors across the United States are tasking senior staffers with changing the way their cities work, Chicago Chief Technology Officer John Tolva said during an interview ... Read More
Civic Commons Gets Funding, Andrew McLaughlin
BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, June 1 2011
Andrew McLaughlin, Civic Commons' new executive director, in 2008. Photo: Joi Ito/Flickr The fledgling open-source-for-governments project Civic Commons will launch as a nonprofit with the help of a $250,000 grant from ... Read More
On 'Cities as Software'
BY Nick Judd | Monday, May 23 2011
Marcus Westbury, the festival organizer who led an effort to reinvigorate the downtown in his native Newcastle, Australia, by filling it with small businesses, art installations and temporary uses, shares an article he ... Read More
Bright Lights, Small City: Is Tiny Roosevelt Island a Microcosm of Urban Innovation's Future?
BY Nick Judd | Monday, May 9 2011
The Roosevelt Island tram, one of the only urban tram systems in the country. Photo: Shinya Suzuki / flickr Jonathan Kalkin gets excited when he talks about his latest scheme, a plan to build one of the world's first ... Read More
Chicago's New CTO Is a 'Smarter Cities' Alpha Geek
BY Nick Judd | Friday, April 22 2011
John Tolva, the former director of citizenship and technology at IBM, will be the next chief technology officer for the City of Chicago, the Chicago Tribune reports. Read More
In Boston, City Hall Pursues Innovation In-House
BY Nick Judd | Thursday, April 21 2011
Nigel Jacob, co-chair of the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics. Photo: Nick Judd / techPresident
Cities across the country seek to lay the groundwork for innovative third parties to build on, based on the premise that city government is too inflexible or narrow-minded to be the best host for ground-breaking work. ... Read More
A Map of the U.S. Open Government World
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, April 6 2011
GovLoop, GOOD, former U.S. Deputy CTO Beth Noveck, and open gov researcher Angie Newell team up to create a clickable visualization that maps out more than 350 federal open government projects. Read More
Austin City Limits: What's Holding Back Government Innovation in Austin, Texas?
BY Nick Judd | Friday, March 4 2011
Why can't the City of Austin's government operate like a real 21st-century municipality? Photo: Doc Searls / Flickr Four years after starting a website redesign process, and the home of the SXSW media, technology and ... Read More
The Europe roundup: Why mySociety folks should run a Masters in Public Technology
BY Antonella Napolitano | Monday, February 28 2011
UK | Why mySociety folks should run a Masters in Public Technology ... as their boss says! Tom Steinberg explains why he thinks people in his team should run a Master "which would take people with the raw skill and the ... Read More
Gov 2.0 Summit: Tom Steinberg on .gov Sites as Public Goods
BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, September 9 2009
I'm attending the Gov 2.0 Summit today and tomorrow, and the program is thick with great speakers and topics. Posting may be in snippets. Read More
Sunlight Snags Open Source Award
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, July 22 2009
Clay Johnson and his team at Sunlight Labs have won the 2009 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award at OSCON 2009 in the "Best Community Builder" category.* Not bad for a bunch of civic-minded government geeks. ... Read More
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