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The Long Hack: Finding Your Own Take on Civic Tech By Way of ‘Smart Cities’
Credit: Rob Pongsajapan I want to begin by putting two facts from Anthony Townsend’s new book, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers and the Quest for a New Utopia, right beside each other. First,...
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Carl Malamud’s Lawsuit-Fighting Kickstarter Campaign to Put Public Standards...
Carl Malamud When is a Kickstarter campaign more than a Kickstarter campaign? In the case of near-legendary citizen archivist Carl Malamud, it’s when the campaign is also a bid to test whether the...
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INTERVIEW: Anthony Townsend on Hacking Into ‘Smart Cities’
A civic hackathon in Portland. Credit: Sam Churchill on Flickr When it comes to how civic technology can change the world, the conversation has a way of shifting back and forth between the start-up...
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The Visual Display of Fugitive Information
Credit: StreetCred Nick Selby didn’t go to the police academy until age 45, when the tech-savvy information security expert wanted to better understand the mechanics of catching fugitives out in the...
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Clay Johnson’s Rules for Procurement for the People
Clay Johnson in 2010. Credit: Joi Ito on Flickr Technologist Clay Johnson has been trumpeting his message that governments big and small have to rethink how they buy goods and services for some time...
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The Case for For-Profit Civic Tech
Omidyar Network co-founder Pierre Omidyar. Credit: Flickr user OnInnovation In a post making its way around the civic innovation world today, the Omidyar Network’s Matt Bannick and Stacy Donohue...
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What Can a Bunch of Burlington Coders Know About Upgrading a 140-Year-Old...
Burlington’s Fletcher Free Library. Credit: Rob Friesel on Flickr Hack the Stacks is a civic hackathon taking place this Saturday and Sunday at Fletcher Free Library in Burlington, Vt. It’s a project...
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An Argument for Government as the Entreprenuerial Kid in the Garage
There is, you might have heard, a sense among some in Silicon Valley that the very best thing government can do to spur innovation is to get so far out of the way that technologists can hardly see it...
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The Making of “The Most Advanced Sign on Earth”
Credit: BREAKFAST This summer, the six-person Brooklyn urban design shop BREAKFAST floated the idea of a street sign that looked like other street signs, except that it would feature an...
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How Canadian Journalists Are Uncovering Their Country’s Invisible Pipelines
The CBC’s new Pipeline Incident Map. Credit: CBC.ca In North America these days, there’s broad enough public awareness of pipeline safety that it’s common to hear mention of "Keystone XL" in any...
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Now Every Bike Law in Chicago Can Fit Into Your Cycling Tights
Chicago transportation planner Steven Vance is under no illusions that his new Chicago Bike Laws app is going to light up the top ten list on the iTunes Store when it’s eventually approved. The free...
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The White House Sends a “Tech Team” to Detroit
Credit: Trevor McGoldrick on Flickr In a bit of interesting news coming out of Washington today, it seems that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has assembled what it is calling...
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Find Out Just How Affordable Your Neighborhood Is
The land is beautiful, but how much will it cost you to get to and from work every day? Credit: Gabor Kovacs on Flickr When buying or renting a house, what you pay isn’t measured solely by the rent or...
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How Boston Is Building the Hotels.com of Public Schools
The new Discover BPS, launched by Boston Public Schools on November 1. Figuring out where to send your child to school is a difficult decision in any city, perhaps, but in few places has it been as...
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Here, Google Just Fixed Local Democracy for You
Credit: Hipkiss.org Google has cracked a major data challenge that has nothing to do with search, online ads or figuring how to get people to give Google Plus the respect it deserves. Now, Google has...
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Britain’s Royal Architects: We Should Build Our Cities on Real-Time Data
London map made with Stamen map tiles and OpenStreetMap. Credit: Kake Pugh on Flickr The Royal Institute of British Architects is out with a new report called "Designing with Data: Shaping Our Future...
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A Font for Chattanooga. But Not for You.
Over on Atlantic Cities, designer Steven Heller has the backstory on Chatype, which is now Chattanooga’s official typeface, having gotten its start as a Kickstarter campaign. By all accounts, that...
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Creating a Global Geography of Wheelchair Accessibility
A Wheelmap view of Chicago. When OpenStreetMap began in 2004, creator Steve Coast’s simple ambition was to access a map of his neighborhood. (He lived in the U.K., where maps were held by the...
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Billionaires to Do Tech Support for U.S. Schools
Mark Zuckerberg. Credit: Robert Scoble on Flickr There is a good chance that you’ve heard how Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg — in the form of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Facebook...
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The Messy Taxonomy of “Civic Tech”
The Knight Foundation has published a new report that maps the state of "civic tech," a catchall term that here encompasses everything from the election-education hub Project Vote Smart to the...
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