10 Reasons Why City Governments Should Embrace Hackathons

Rachel Sterne is Chief Digital Officer for the City of New York, where she focuses on the City’s digital media strategy. You can follow her on Twitter @RachelSterne or follow the City @nycgov Today is the last day to sign up for Reinvent NYC.GOV, the City’s first-ever hackathon. Civic-minded designers and developers who want toRead… Read more »

Putting the heat on cycling data

We often use examples of visualisations or maps to describe open data, but if we look at more advanced types of mapping, you can find heatmapping too. Above is a map created using open data in Kent plotted by @purplegeode of just that, it’s a heatmap of cycle park availability, which will be very usefulRead… Read more »

How do you feel about work on Monday mornings?

People crack me up with their Monday morning emotions and facial expressions. How do you feel when you get up Monday morning and arrive at work? Corporate Rebel: Some Monday mornings, I feel blessed to have a job. But, other Monday mornings I feel like shooting myself. I am searching for the job that IRead… Read more »

Exit or Voice? How About Neither?

The very first post on this blog, published almost two years ago now, led with “Give us your hands, not just your voices.” I thought of that as I read a Reuters piece this morning entitled The Year We Gave Up on Government. It’s a fascinating piece, with a number of really thought-provoking observations andRead… Read more »

The Exciting Life of a Street Sweeper

I’ve never actually ridden in the street sweeper even though I’ve managed street sweeping operations in the past. But I can certainly imagine what it would be like. Day after day of driving about 10 miles an hour along the edge of every road carefully avoiding parked cars, pedestrians, and bicyclists. Then driving to theRead… Read more »

It’s All About the Crew

The second in my series of articles on the Virginia State Parks Youth Conservation Corps – an example of government at its best, preparing youth for the future. Year after year we tell park staff – the Youth Conservation Corps crew will get more done than you expect. Even parks that have had crews yearRead… Read more »

The Quickest Way To Deploy A Well Engineered Apache Hadoop Solution To A Production Environment

As a former enterprise CTO and current technology watcher, I was struck at the incredible brilliance of yesterday’s announcement by Dell and Cloudera. In a move that will help enterprises of all sizes serve a very wide range of missions, those two organizations have announced a new relationship that will enable something that has neverRead… Read more »

I’m at it again. What will I say this time about gov, technology and saving money?

Looks like it’s my turn in the barrel for another webinar about how govs can save money and increase efficiency by using modern technology. I have to admit that I am a bit keyed up about the direction technology is heading and now is the time to take advantage of the opportunities. Too often govsRead… Read more »