LocalData, the Law, and User Research

Sometimes people ask what it’s like to be a Code for America Fellow and work on things like LocalData. By my expression, they quickly garner that it’s hard work. But as demonstrated by the tale of LocalData user research, it’s also exciting times. LocalData is a toolkit that helps groups collect place-based data. For example,Read… Read more »

A Civic Stack Thought Experiment

It is well known that the Internet protocol suite consists of a stack of layers: the application layer sitting on top of the transport layer, the internet layer, and the link layer. Detailed analysis of the interaction of these layers has yielded insight into the rapid information innovation we’re experiencing as a matter of practiceRead… Read more »

CfA Peer Network

We’re are gathered the Code for America tribe in San Francisco. Our city partners in the fellowship, the leaders of the Brigades in 16 cities, fellows past, present, and future, the companies in our civic accelerator, our funders and supporters, and others who care about reinventing the citizen-government relationship for the 21st century. Two hundredRead… Read more »

Summit Week: Anatomy of A Civic Startup

It’s Summit Week! We at Code for America are pumped to showcase the amazing projects and apps created by the Code for America fellows, their respective partner cities, and, most recently, the Accelerator teams. As the newest additions of the Code for America family, the civic startups in the Accelerator program will be demoing forRead… Read more »

Government tops the list of effective email marketers

For all the claims of government communication being expensive or ineffective compared to the private sector, government has topped the Vision 6 Email Marketing Metrics Report for January – June 2012. Vision 6, an email marketing company based in Queensland, has reported on the email marketing effectiveness of Australian companies and agencies for the lastRead… Read more »

Wisdom of the Clouds at DHS Open Cybersecurity Summit Oct 18 in DC

In 2009 I received a phone call from the Policy Office at the Department of Homeland Security. At the time, I personally did not know a soul at DHS and have never envisioned I would be called upon to share best practices for government open source software projects with the federal government. But there itRead… Read more »

Government Reform: Inspirations from Developing Countries (Part 5)

Several developing countries are making seemingly breathtaking progress in developing performance management frameworks from scratch. What can we learn from them? Today’s focus is on the commonalities in the performance management approaches used across four developing countries. The World Bank seminars this past Spring continue to have me mulling about the progress of the performanceRead… Read more »

A new structured open data portal for gov data

Captricity (http://captricity.com), an award-winning Berkeley, CA–based company that offers a completely web-based data entry service for digitizing paper forms, is today announcing the launch of its Open Data Portal (http://captricity.com/opendata). Data – structured, digital data that can be queried and analyzed – is an incredibly valuable resource. Captricity already helps organizations and corporations access importantRead… Read more »

Naval Surface Warfare Center Develops 3D Mobile Spying Malware, National Cyber Security Awareness Month, and More

By AlexOlesker Here is today’s federal cybersecurity and information technology news: The Naval Surface Warfare Center has developed a malicious mobile application that makes infected phones take random photos which are stitched together to reconstruct surroundings in 3D. More here. The U.S. Energy Information Administration launched its application programming interface which allows developers to designRead… Read more »