Civic Commons

"We saw an opportunity to take an experiment done in Philadelphia and apply it in Denver ahead of our summer hackathon to generate a test case for simple engagement methods and generate a large amount of data. In partnership with OpenPlans, we are proud to announce Denver’s Beautiful Streets."

"If I show up at city hall and start saying, ‘Hey there, can you give me your data?’ people usually get defensive and assume it is for some sort of ‘gotcha’ project or story,” says Mertens. “But when you show them that local developers can build in a weekend what it would take a city months or years, they start to loosen up. Using public art data is a nice gateway drug — its innocuous, it doesn’t involve crime or children."

"We also are working with Code for America (CFA) to partner with the City on an accelerator for startups that focus on civic issues, funded by Google and the Kauffman Foundation. CFA will also provide a platform for civic hackers to maintain and adapt open source code for the city, establish a fellowship assigning three bright minds to city government for a year to solve specific problems, and create a Civic Commons Marketplace for cities to share technology and collaborate on new technologies and applications."

"Why should every city government treat the same issues as unique barriers? If one has pushed through a solution, why would we try to face the issue as a barrier? If we change our mode of thinking we are now viewing this issue simply as a process to follow. I’m not trying to simplify complex scenarios nor to undervalue thoughtful planning, but I don’t see how we can view the same problems as unique, over and over again. Take the hard work others have done before us, leverage it for our city and residents benefit, and do the same with out struggles and wins- publish our process successes and our common software solutions and share in the efficiencies and collaborations that can strengthen our governments and improve their operation.

To wit, this is exactly how I’m approaching our efforts to implement opendata in both the City of Oakland and the County of Alameda. San Francisco, New York and Chicago have done the hard work blazing a trail, now we have a great process to follow so we don’t have to do the same hard work as they did.

* Identify problem
* Search for existing solution
* Plug and play.

And I think that the more we talk about the processes and struggles to change, the more we all gain."

"Ultimately, our goal is to create a highly visible community hub that will imbue open concepts into the formulation stages of new hardware and software projects, and help existing projects transition to open modes of development and operation,” writes William Eshagh on the open.NASA blog."

"Increasingly, citizens are demanding access to raw data from governments to hold public officials accountable, look up facts, conduct analysis, or create innovative applications and services. Cities and towns create data using geographic information systems such as layers describing parcels, zoning, and infrastructure that are useful for a wide range of purposes. Through a public records request to all 351 Massachusetts municipalities, this paper investigates whether these data are accessible to citizens in practice. Some response was received by 78.6 percent of the municipalities. Two municipalities refused access to all electronic records. Many others charged fees ranging up to $453 or placed legal restrictions on the data through licensing that could chill or prohibit creative reuses of the information through emerging technologies. Other practical barriers limited public access to data, such as limited resources, government officials’ limited technical knowledge, and outsourcing to private vendors. A followup survey among municipalities that did not respond to the request was conducted to determine if they had GIS systems or data policies, and this information was collected for 80.3 percent of the municipalities. Finally, the paper discusses the legal, policy, and technical steps that can be taken by governments to move from a “public records” to an “open government” paradigm for transparency of government data. The policy recommendations for municipalities include publishing GIS data for free online and with minimal legal restrictions."

"Mike Reich, president of Seabourne consulting, wrote on his blog on Dec. 22 that his company helped to create MyFCC. He said the new platform was relatively inexpensive to create because it leverages the open-source content available at the main Web portal FCC.gov “Because we were able to leverage the FCC.gov content through the API, the time and cost to develop MyFCC were radically lower than alternative approaches. This is a great example of how a Web API Platform architecture can help reduce development cost while supporting cutting-edge applications,” Reich wrote."

"Open government data and APIs present a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs."