Posts By Mark Headd

Built to Fail: Why Governments Struggle to Implement New Technology

The great truism that underlies the civic technology movement of the last several years is that governments face difficulty implementing technology, and they generally manage IT assets and projects very poorly. It can be tempting to view this lack of technology acumen as a symptom of a larger disfunction. Governments are thought to be large,Read… Read more »

Announcing the Accela App Challenge

At Accela, we’re committed to finding ways to leverage the talents and ideas of civic entrepreneurs and open data hackers to benefit the governments we serve. That’s why we’re excited to announce the Accela App Challenge. The App Challenge offers a total of $25,000 in cash prizes to developers that build a new civic appRead… Read more »

Building a Government Data Culture

“‘Are people innately altruistic?’ is the wrong kind of question to ask. People are people, and they respond to incentives.” – Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner (SuperFreakonomics) One of the most important things an open data directive can accomplish – whether it takes the form an informal policy, an executive order or an open dataRead… Read more »

Introducing Engagement Commons [beta]

A few weeks ago, Code for America unveiled one of our latest program offerings: Engagement Commons. Now, we’re hoping that the talented, dedicated members of the GovLoop community can help us take this project to the next level. What is Engagement Commons? With civic engagement becoming an increasingly critical component of successful governance in theRead… Read more »

OpenData Race Begins in Philadelphia

Several months ago, with the unveiling of the OpenDataPhilly website, the City of Philadelphia joined the growing fraternity of cities across the country and around the world to release municipal data sets in open, developer friendly formats. But the City of Brotherly Love did things a bit differently than most of it’s contemporaries. The cityRead… Read more »

Gov 2.0 is Open Source

It’s interesting to reflect back on the not too distant past and think about how governments have used open source software. For many state and local governments – as recently as a few years ago – the use of open source software was something of a foreign concept. Many a government IT worker made anRead… Read more »