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In Texas, a Small Town Hopes for a Gov 2.0 Makeover Miracle
A QR code at a park in Manor, Tx., is a visual hyperlink to more information about the field. City of Manor // Flickr photo
As technologists around the country — some of whom you may have heard of — are calling for an age of innovation, experimentation, and rebirth in the American city, those same localities are shutting off streetlights (as in my home town of Santa Rosa, Ca.), downsizing police forces, closing public transit lines, and reducing other services.
Open government advocates see technology and innovation — used correctly — as part of the solution. And as part of two-day conference in a city regarded as an example of innovation in practice, they'll try to prove that tech solutions to civic problems can be replicated on any scale.
On Sept. 20 and 21, Manor, Tx. will host manor.govfresh, a two-day conference for state and local public servants to talk tech and open government. And they'll be giving another Texas town — De Leon, population 2,433 — a "Gov City 2.0 Makeover."
In Australia, Voters Robo-Call You!
The Australian Youth Climate Coalition is asking constituents to robo-call their members of Parliament.
Here's a switch: In Australia, one online organizing group is having their constituents robo-call their members of Parliament.
The Australian Youth Climate Coalition is using a tool they're calling "Power Vote" to allow constituents to put in their name, email and postcode, and with a click of a button, the coalition's phone bank sends the constituent's MP a pre-recorded phone call. The constituent doesn't say a word; the recorded voice message works in each user's name and postcode, but otherwise, unlike most click-to-call tools, it's the same, automated call, every time.
Beyond the obvious irony — how many voters have picked up the phone at dinner time to hear the Bill Clintons or Sarah Palins of the world delivering a "personal" message on behalf of a candidate on this or that ballot? Talk about flipping the script — there are serious questions about what this type of campaign does to the signal-to-noise ratio in politics.
StreetFilms' Introduction to Transit Data
A Case for Open Data in Transit from Streetfilms on Vimeo.
The folks at StreetFilms, part of OpenPlans, today released a video argument in favor of public transit authorities releasing the data they gather in the course of operations.
Major public transit authorities across the country, in cities like Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and New York City, have embraced this idea. The result, they say, is that communities of developers have built applications on top of that data that make commuting easier — without protracted and costly procurement processes. It's the central pitch of the Gov 2.0 movement: A more transparent and participatory government that is simultaneously smaller and more efficient.
Among the highlights of this video: While so many people in the Gov 2.0 and open data communities are discussing buses and trains, Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase says that data coming from cars is "going into the wind."
"Imagine how much innovation we would get if there were an open black box in cars," Chase says. "Car sharing would be one application, better routing would be another."
And New York's top public transit official, Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO Jay Walder, bluntly says in the video that the MTA was wrong in keeping its data — which can include anything from train schedules to the locations of station exits — out of public view for so long.
"The MTA has, for too long, really, pushed the development community away," Walder says.
In Which a Man Dressed As an Air Freshener Makes Fun of Snooki
A man dressed as a giant air freshener is taking to the New Jersey streets in search of fellow Garden Staters who, like him, feel that the state is getting a bad rap in the latest spate of Jersey-themed reality television shows.
This is all part of web video to support an online PR push called Jersey Doesn't Stink, which is geared as a pushback against shows like "The Jersey Shore" and "Real Housewives of New Jersey" on behalf of people who feel these programs reinforce unfair stereotypes of New Jersey residents as mindless fistpumpers with fake tans or bad drivers with awful hair.
Actor Anthony DeVito roams what looks to be Hoboken and Jersey City, seeking support for the homeland of Bruce Springsteen and Frank Sinatra by way of Snooki references.
"That girl looks like a pumpkin, though, doesn't she?" he asks one man.
In a conversation with two Jersey residents on a park bench, he sums the gist of the campaign in a single line: "It's unfair to paint everyone in New Jersey with that same broad, orange brush."
The War Logs: Real-Time Violence
Veteran New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers used the War Logs released Sunday by Wikileaks to pull together an account of a bloody battle between insurgents and American soldiers not unlike the dispatches he has filed from the field for years.
But this article by the former Marine infantry officer was different. It's an account made possible thanks to documents released on the Internet — and the documents themselves are electronic communications filed in real time by soldiers as they took incoming fire.
The Challenge of Tech for Civic Groups
Here in New York, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and our friends and sometime partners at OpenPlans are collaborating to create a government-sponsored social networking platform — something that will, they hope, become a next-generation tool for communities to organize themselves and get involved in the city's policy and politics.
Called Speak Up New York, the fledgling collaboration is engaged in first steps: Taking an inventory of tools that community boards and local groups are already using, trying to put together a guide to starting a community group. Members of the Speak Up New York Meetup group have a working group meeting scheduled for Monday. (The Meetup is open for any interested New Yorker to join and attend.)
Speak Up New York is another step towards making digital New York — that tiny speck of the Internet where policy ideas are tossed around, public comment is collected, and information exchanges happen between city agencies and city residents — more open and participatory.
This would be an ambitious and, I think, unprecedented expansion on the idea of civic conversation in the digital space. Online civic community-building is not new; people like Steven Clift and the other folks behind Minnesota-based e-democracy.org have been doing it for over a decade. More recently, youngest-PdF-speaker-ever Conor White-Sullivan and the Localocracy crew, based in Massachusetts, have focused on allowing people to discuss and weigh individual policy issues at the local level.
Where the Small Money Goes, 2010 Edition
With Nancy Scola looking at the future of the big-dollar Democratic donor and Businessweek — Businessweek! — diving in to the fundraising proclivities of Rep. Michele Bachmann, maybe it's time to take a look at what small-dollar donors are actually doing this year.
They're giving. Oh yes, they are: To Bachmann, and to other marquee candidates either competing outside the fold of their party establishment or engaged in a Quixotic campaign for a seat they'll never occupy.
The candidates that acquire the most contributions under $200 — unitemized contributions — are also the most partisan, single-issue, or nationally polarizing, an analysis of Federal Elections Commission data shows. For example, Tarryl Lynn Clark, the Minnesota Democrat-Farmer-Labor candidate running against Bachmann, saw 53 percent of $2.1 million come to her campaign in contributions of $200 or less. The congresswoman herself received 34 percent of $4.1 million in the form of small-dollar donations ...
Battle over Use of Contributor Data Continues Between Aristotle and NGP
In a complaint sent to the Federal Elections Commission dated July 19, NGP Software resurrected its objections over how Aristotle software makes use of FEC data about political contributors.
Finally, Facts Unsealed In Aristotle - NGP Court Cases
Aristotle and NGP Software, two of the political technology industry's top service platforms, have for years been in a long-drawn-out court battle in which each seeks a federal court's intervention in the other's advertising practices — and late last month, much of that battle finally became a matter of public record.
The Trouble With Turtles: A Q&A With the Federal Oil Spill Response Team
Federal spokespeople answer questions about the impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill on sea turtles. In lower right, a tweet pertaining to the Q&A from the joint federal response's Twitter account.
The joint federal-BP command center on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster on Friday held a live video town hall on the subject of sea turtles.
Federal maps available online show that there are sea turtle populations in the path of the oil spill, and there has been concern for some time now over the impact of various responses — dispersants, corralling and burning surface oil — on sea turtles.
What Do Prince and the Rupee Have in Common?
The new symbol for the Indian rupee, designed by Shri D Udaya Kumar. Image: Government of India / Press Information Bureau
Via Gawker, here's a Reuters report that the Indian rupee's new symbol was approved yesterday.
It was chosen in a design competition that garnered over 3,000 entries.
Reuters: "The winning design, pulled from a shortlist of five, came from a post-graduate student who won $5,000."
From the English-language press release, we learn that the symbol will be rolled into the Unicode standard Indian officials will work with software companies to work the symbol into new releases of software.
The PdF 2010 Conversation: An Analysis
Using ManyEyes and data from our Personal Democracy Forum 2010 Twitterslurp application, here are some ways to parse the conversations and exchanges of ideas that happened on Twitter as a result of our conference in June.
Maybe this is also an opportunity for folks to play with data visualization as a tool for making interesting discoveries rather than just pretty pictures. Here's an experiment.
Fighting Street Harassment, One Snapshot at a Time
In 2005, Emily May launched Hollaback NYC , a blog dedicated to collecting first-hand experiences of women being catcalled, leered at and groped in New York City as a way to document and, hopefully, eliminate street harassment.
Victory for Open Data Advocates in Tel Aviv
Open data advocates gained a victory Monday in Tel Aviv, Israel, when a district court there issued a ruling that orders the municipality to publish its budget in a machine-readable format, Movement for Freedom of Information in Israel Director Roy Peled wrote in an e-mail.
The municipality was already publishing its budget in book and PDF form. The decision applies from the 2011 budget onward, according to Peled. The municipality has already agreed to publish this year's budget in a machine-readable format.
In Seattle, Tracking Buses in Real-Time
OneBusAway.org
Here's an example of something useful made with public data: One Bus Away, an open-source application that gets data on bus schedules and locations in and around Seattle to show you in real time where your bus is, where it's going to be, and when it should get there.
The MTA Releases a Dataset, Seeks Dev Input
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the budget-beleaguered public authority here in New York State that manages New York City subways and buses, as well as regional rail, released a new dataset today and will be holding an application development contest in the fall, an MTA staffer announced Thursday night.
Analyzing the California Campaign Stack
If ever a campaign was an example of how bells and whistles do not a victory make, it's Chuck DeVore's campaign for U.S. Senate in California. He lost in the June 8 Republican primaries to Carly Fiorina, the favored Republican establishment candidate. Fiorina now faces Boxer in the run-up to the November general election.
But DeVore's campaign tested out several new technologies during the campaign, launching an iPhone app in January and using the brand-new fundraising software Blue Swarm, for which 2010 is the inaugural election cycle, to offer volunteers the ability to send emails and track pledges from their own lists of fundraising contacts.
The thing is, it doesn't look like the experiments really paid off.
The Education of @BilldeBlasio
New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio's transformation into @billdeblasio continues:
NYC Event Thursday July 1: 'In Code We Trust'
Design by Ange Tran / eyebeam.org
Tomorrow night at Eyebeam, an arts and technology center in Chelsea, a panel of hackers, observers, doers and thinkers will talk about the subject at "In Code We Trust: crowd sourced democracy in the 21st century," a discussion offered as part of an ongoing exhibition about participation in culture and society.
Where's the Oil? Citizen Reporters Deliver a Map of Oil Spill Sightings
The map generated by reports about the presence or absence of oil using Oil Reporter, an open data application built by CrisisCommons and its allies.
