Was doing some research for a story I am writing over at TechPresident which had me visiting the site of Mxit, a social network built largely for mobile phones and used by urban youths in South Africa. Check out the landing page for the site (note the red circle): So, where I grew up “NeverRead… Read more »
apologies for any typos, I’d like to look this over more, but I’ve got to get to other work. Tom Slee has a very well written blog post with a critical perspective of open data. I encourage you to go and read it – but also to dive into the comments below it, which IRead… Read more »
Some of you may know that I sit on the board of directors for OpenNorth – a cool little non-profit that is building tools for citizens, governments and journalists to improve participation and, sometimes, just make it a little bit easier to be a citizen. Here’s great example of a simple tool they created thatRead… Read more »
I have an idea. I want to suggest starting a community of disruptive software companies that are trying to sell products to local and regional governments. I know we can make city’s better, more participatory, more accessible, to say nothing of saving them money. But to be effective I think we need a common messageRead… Read more »
Last weekend at FooCamp, I co-hosted a session titled “The End of the World: Will the Internet Destroy the State, or Will the State Destroy the Internet?” What follows are the ideas I opened with during my intro to the session and some additional thoughts I’ve had and that others shared during the conversation. ToRead… Read more »
… I’ve not stopped blogging! I’ve just been really swamped and having my intellectual batteries recharged. Frankly, I’ll admit they were feeling flat, but I got some really juicy posts I’m mulling over. In the mean time I’m just trying to catch up on life – it’s been an exciting 7 days. Here’s a listRead… Read more »
Earlier this week the Ottawa Citizen ran a story in which I’m quoted about a fight between Treasury Board and Canada Post officials over making postal code data open. Treasury Board officials would love to add it to data.gc.ca while Canada post officials are, to put it mildly, deeply opposed. This is of course, unsurprisingRead… Read more »
Last week the White House launched its new roadmap for digital government. This included the publication of Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People (PDF version), the issuing of a Presidential directive and the announcement of White House Innovation Fellows. In other words, it was a big week forRead… Read more »
A couple of years ago I was in Portugal to give a talk on Gov 2.0 at a conference the government was organizing. After the talk I went for dinner with the country’s CIO and remember hearing about a fantastic program they were running that – for me – epitomized the notion of a citizenRead… Read more »
Let me start by saying, I really like SurveyMonkey. By this I mean, I like SurveyMonkey specifically, but I also like online survey’s in general. They are easy to ignore if I’m uninterested in the topic but – when the topic is relevant – it is a great, simple service that allows me to shareRead… Read more »