Springwise: “City residents may not have degrees in urban planning, but their everyday use of high streets, parks and main roads means they have some valuable input into what’s best for their local environment. A new website called Streetmix is helping to empower citizens, enabling them to become architects with an easy-to-use street-building platform. Developed by Code for America, the site greets users with a colorful cartoon representation of a typical street, split into segments of varying widths. Designers can then swap and change each piece into road, cycle paths, pedestrian areas, bus stops, bike racks and other amenities,... (More >)
You Can Predict What Government Agencies Will Buy; For Real!
Jen Clement at GovLoop: “Two great free government-run websites that show how federal government agencies are spending their money are USASpending.gov and FedBizOpps.gov. Each site allows you to research how the government has spent its procurement dollars in the last several years, and can give business owners a snapshot of what industry segments and what type of commercial products and services offer the best contracting opportunities so vendors can conduct their target business analysis and approach a select group of potential buyers. SmartProcure offers a unique service that allows you to search thousands and thousands of government purchase orders,... (More >)
Out in the Open: Hackers Bring Lawmaking Into the 21st Century
Wired: “Have you ever thought you could do a better job writing the laws of our country than those jokers on Capitol Hill? Or have you at least felt the urge to scratch a few lines out of a bill and replace them with something else? Here’s your chance. Every bill currently being debated in the U.S. House of Representatives is available from a single website, and anyone can comment on the legislation or annotate it. The site is powered by Madison Project, an open source software platform for writing, publishing, and annotating legislation. Like the site itself, the... (More >)
GitHub and Government
New site: “Make government better, together. Stories of open source, open data, and open government. This site is an open source effort to showcase best practices of open sourcing government. See something that you think could be better? Want to submit your own story? Simply fork the project and submit a pull request. … Ready to get started on GitHub? Here are some ideas that are easy to get your feet wet with. Feedback Repository GitHub’s about connecting with developers. Whether you’re an API publishing pro, or just getting started, creating a “feedback” repository can go a long way... (More >)
Five Ways to Make Government Procurement Better
Mark Headd at Civic Innovations: “Nothing in recent memory has focused attention on the need for wholesale reform of the government IT procurement system more than the troubled launch of healthcare.gov. There has been a myriad of blog posts, stories and articles written in the last few weeks detailing all of the problems that led to the ignominious launch of the website meant to allow people to sign up for health care coverage. Though the details of this high profile flop are in the latest headlines, the underlying cause has been talked about many times before – the process... (More >)
NEW Publication: “Reimagining Governance in Practice: Benchmarking British Columbia’s Citizen Engagement Efforts”
Over the last few years, the Government of British Columbia (BC), Canada has initiated a variety of practices and policies aimed at providing more legitimate and effective governance. Leveraging advances in technology, the BC Government has focused on changing how it engages with its citizens with the goal of optimizing the way it seeks input and develops and implements policy. The efforts are part of a broader trend among a wide variety of democratic governments to re-imagine public service and governance. At the beginning of 2013, BC’s Ministry of Citizens’ Services and Open Government, now the Ministry of Technology,... (More >)
The Brave New World of Good
Brad Smith: “Welcome to the Brave New World of Good. Once almost the exclusive province of nonprofit organizations and the philanthropic foundations that fund them, today the terrain of good is disputed by social entrepreneurs, social enterprises, impact investors, big business, governments, and geeks. Their tools of choice are markets, open data, innovation, hackathons, and disruption. They cross borders, social classes, and paradigms with the swipe of a touch screen. We seemed poised to unleash a whole new era of social and environmental progress, accompanied by unimagined economic prosperity. As a brand, good is unassailably brilliant. Who could be... (More >)
A Global Online Network Lets Health Professionals Share Expertise
Rebecca Weintraub, Aaron C. Beals, Sophie G. Beauvais, Marie Connelly, Julie Rosenberg Talbot, Aaron VanDerlip, and Keri Wachter in HBR Blog Network : “In response, our team at the Global Health Delivery Project at Harvard launched an online platform to generate and disseminate knowledge in health care delivery. With guidance from Paul English, chief technology officer of Kayak, we borrowed a common tool from business — professional virtual communities (PVCs) — and adapted it to leverage the wisdom of the crowds. In business, PVCs are used for knowledge management and exchange across multiple organizations, industries, and geographies. In health... (More >)
Defining Open Data
Open Knowledge Foundation Blog: “Open data is data that can be freely used, shared and built-on by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose. This is the summary of the full Open Definition which the Open Knowledge Foundation created in 2005 to provide both a succinct explanation and a detailed definition of open data. As the open data movement grows, and even more governments and organisations sign up to open data, it becomes ever more important that there is a clear and agreed definition for what “open data” means if we are to realise the full benefits of openness, and avoid... (More >)
The transition towards transparency
Roland Harwood at the Open Data Institute Blog: “It’s a very exciting time for the field of open data, especially in the UK public sector which is arguably leading the world in this emerging discipline right now, in no small part thanks to the efforts to the Open Data Institute. There is a strong push to release public data and to explore new innovations that can be created as a result. For instance, the Ordnance Survey have been leading the way with opening up half of their data for others to use, complemented by their GeoVation programme which provides... (More >)
