“Why should every city government treat the same issues as unique barriers? If one has pushed through a solution, why would we try to face the issue as a barrier? If we change our mode of thinking we are now viewing this issue simply as a process to follow. I’m not trying to simplify complex scenarios nor to undervalue thoughtful planning, but I don’t see how we can view the same problems as unique, over and over again. Take the hard work others have done before us, leverage it for our city and residents benefit, and do the same with out struggles and wins- publish our process successes and our common software solutions and share in the efficiencies and collaborations that can strengthen our governments and improve their operation.

To wit, this is exactly how I’m approaching our efforts to implement opendata in both the City of Oakland and the County of Alameda. San Francisco, New York and Chicago have done the hard work blazing a trail, now we have a great process to follow so we don’t have to do the same hard work as they did.

* Identify problem
* Search for existing solution
* Plug and play.

And I think that the more we talk about the processes and struggles to change, the more we all gain.”

-

Steve Spiker: Barriers or Processes?

 Steve Spiker writes a great post about the potential to open-source our processes, not just our code.  Hear hear.

Open Architecture [i.e., The Internet Is a Human Right]:

continuations:

The Internet is not really a technology but rather a set of principles that have become embodied in a bunch of different technologies.  I am going to quote at some length from a document that Cerf also co-authored about the history of the Internet:

The Internet as we now know it embodies a key underlying technical idea, namely that of open architecture networking. In this approach, the choice of any individual network technology was not dictated by a particular network architecture but rather could be selected freely by a provider and made to interwork with the other networks through a meta-level “Internetworking Architecture”

Albert Wenger discusses how the Open Architecture of the internet contributes fundamental rights and freedoms that it offers.

When we talk about “Government as a Platform”, we’re largely drawing a parallel between the architecture of government technology (and cities, more broadly) and the architecture of the Internet.  The idea, described above, that an open architecture is not about any one technology, but rather about a set of principles that can be embodied by different technologies, is the key.  By building around an open architecture, guided by open standards, new specific technologies can be inserted, replaced, and improved as necessary, without disrupting the overall structure.  The freedom that this architecture embodies explicitly encourages innovation, by decreasing the cost of changing or improving any one component, or of adding something new on top of the system.

This all sounds a bit abstract, I’m sure, so for our part at Civic Commons, we’ll work on tying these concepts into more concrete examples.

“Why should every city government treat the same issues as unique barriers? If one has pushed through a solution, why would we try to face the issue as a barrier? If we change our mode of thinking we are now viewing this issue simply as a process to follow. I’m not trying to simplify complex scenarios nor to undervalue thoughtful planning, but I don’t see how we can view the same problems as unique, over and over again. Take the hard work others have done before us, leverage it for our city and residents benefit, and do the same with out struggles and wins- publish our process successes and our common software solutions and share in the efficiencies and collaborations that can strengthen our governments and improve their operation.

To wit, this is exactly how I’m approaching our efforts to implement opendata in both the City of Oakland and the County of Alameda. San Francisco, New York and Chicago have done the hard work blazing a trail, now we have a great process to follow so we don’t have to do the same hard work as they did.

* Identify problem
* Search for existing solution
* Plug and play.

And I think that the more we talk about the processes and struggles to change, the more we all gain.”

-

Steve Spiker: Barriers or Processes?

 Steve Spiker writes a great post about the potential to open-source our processes, not just our code.  Hear hear.

Open Architecture [i.e., The Internet Is a Human Right]:

continuations:

The Internet is not really a technology but rather a set of principles that have become embodied in a bunch of different technologies.  I am going to quote at some length from a document that Cerf also co-authored about the history of the Internet:

The Internet as we now know it embodies a key underlying technical idea, namely that of open architecture networking. In this approach, the choice of any individual network technology was not dictated by a particular network architecture but rather could be selected freely by a provider and made to interwork with the other networks through a meta-level “Internetworking Architecture”

Albert Wenger discusses how the Open Architecture of the internet contributes fundamental rights and freedoms that it offers.

When we talk about “Government as a Platform”, we’re largely drawing a parallel between the architecture of government technology (and cities, more broadly) and the architecture of the Internet.  The idea, described above, that an open architecture is not about any one technology, but rather about a set of principles that can be embodied by different technologies, is the key.  By building around an open architecture, guided by open standards, new specific technologies can be inserted, replaced, and improved as necessary, without disrupting the overall structure.  The freedom that this architecture embodies explicitly encourages innovation, by decreasing the cost of changing or improving any one component, or of adding something new on top of the system.

This all sounds a bit abstract, I’m sure, so for our part at Civic Commons, we’ll work on tying these concepts into more concrete examples.

““Ultimately, our goal is to create a highly visible community hub that will imbue open concepts into the formulation stages of new hardware and software projects, and help existing projects transition to open modes of development and operation,” writes William Eshagh on the open.NASA blog.”

- NASA Launches Agency-wide Open Source Initiative | FedScoop

“Increasingly, citizens are demanding access to raw data from governments to hold public officials accountable, look up facts, conduct analysis, or create innovative applications and services. Cities and towns create data using geographic information systems such as layers describing parcels, zoning, and infrastructure that are useful for a wide range of purposes. Through a public records request to all 351 Massachusetts municipalities, this paper investigates whether these data are accessible to citizens in practice. Some response was received by 78.6 percent of the municipalities. Two municipalities refused access to all electronic records. Many others charged fees ranging up to $453 or placed legal restrictions on the data through licensing that could chill or prohibit creative reuses of the information through emerging technologies. Other practical barriers limited public access to data, such as limited resources, government officials’ limited technical knowledge, and outsourcing to private vendors. A followup survey among municipalities that did not respond to the request was conducted to determine if they had GIS systems or data policies, and this information was collected for 80.3 percent of the municipalities. Finally, the paper discusses the legal, policy, and technical steps that can be taken by governments to move from a “public records” to an “open government” paradigm for transparency of government data. The policy recommendations for municipalities include publishing GIS data for free online and with minimal legal restrictions.”

-

Goodspeed Update » Blog Archive » How Open are Massachusetts Municipal Data?

This is really great.  Rob Goodspeed’s research into the state of open data in MA, from a really practical perspective.  Here’s the link to the full paper.

(via theslowhunch)

“Mike Reich, president of Seabourne consulting, wrote on his blog on Dec. 22 that his company helped to create MyFCC. He said the new platform was relatively inexpensive to create because it leverages the open-source content available at the main Web portal FCC.gov “Because we were able to leverage the FCC.gov content through the API, the time and cost to develop MyFCC were radically lower than alternative approaches. This is a great example of how a Web API Platform architecture can help reduce development cost while supporting cutting-edge applications,” Reich wrote.”

-

New website MyFCC lets users design their own dashboard with FCC data, news — Federal Computer Week

Great example of FCC “eating its own dogfood” — consuming its own APIs for the new My.FCC.gov.

SFpark Open Sourced -- "Circle less, live more.":

kfogel:

As announced on the OpenGeo blog and at SFpark.org, all the components of San Francisco’s innovative parking space management system are now open source — and they’ve gone out of their way to make it re-useable by other cities.

Here’s what SFpark does in a nutshell: it ties together …

“Open government data and APIs present a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs.”

-

Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne (via nycdigital)

Hear hear!

“Shareabouts is a mapping app for crowd sourcing, taking our recent work on the NYCDOT bike share map in a new direction. Shareabouts will have a simple, fun interface that makes it easy to add your voice to the map: suggest a location, add a comment, support other suggestions and share locations with your friends and neighbors. Shareabouts gets out of the way, letting you focus on getting points on the map. Behind the scenes, it’s a Rails app running on PostGIS spatial database, with a nice mapping front end. And behind all that, the real powerhouse of Julia and Andy.

We have some core design concepts in mind for Shareabouts:

• Mobile is important, especially in lower-income and under-represented communities. Shareabouts needs to have a terrific experience on a mobile device. 
• Your crowdsourced mapping website should look great, tweaked just how you like it. Skinnability matters. 
• Open311 standards will be in Shareabouts’ DNA, so you can use it as a front-end for all sorts of civic apps. 
• Translations should be easy. Shareabouts will be a good fit, whether you want to say “Suggest a bike rack location” or “共有自転車置場がどこにあったらいいかな” . 

Like many projects in their early days, there’s not much to look at yet. But as you know if you’re a follower of the open source way, being completely open from day zero is the Right Approach. We’re just getting going on something that we hope will be a pretty exciting project, and we want you on board from the very start of the journey. Here’s a list of ways you can get involved.

Most importantly, what do you want Shareabouts to do? Tell us! Check out the pipeline of work we’ve got planned, and join our developer mailing list. Please kick the tires on our dev server, and dig into the project on Github. And stay tuned…”

(via Hello, Shareabouts | OpenPlans)

“In a post this morning at the WhiteHouse.gov blog, federal CIO Steven VanRoekel (@StevenVDC) and federal CTO Aneesh Chopra (@AneeshChopra) explained more about how Data.gov is going global:
“As part of a joint effort by the United States and India to build an open government platform, the U.S. team has deposited open source code — an important benchmark in developing the Open Government Platform that will enable governments around the world to stand up their own open government data sites.”
The development is evidence that the U.S. and India are indeed still collaborating on open government together, despite India’s withdrawal from the historic Open Government Partnership (OGP) that launched in September. Chopra and VanRoekel explicitly connected the move to open source Data.gov to the U.S. involvement in the Open Government Partnership today. While we’ll need to see more code and adoption to draw substantive conclusions on the outcomes of this part of the plan, this is clearly progress.”

- White House to open source Data.gov as open government data platform - O’Reilly Radar

““The idea behind open innovation is as simple as it is powerful: the creators of new ideas don’t have to be within your organization in order to be helpful””

- John Palfrey, from Intellectual Property Strategy (http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12603)

Palfrey’s new book is a great primer on intellectual property, written to be relevant to leaders of any type of organization.  It focuses on the practical organizational opportunities around intellectual property assets, and encourages a broader view than the traditional “sword and shield” approach.  Great, short read.