I’m helping plan this conference at MIT in April. We opened registration and announced the call for papers today. REGISTRATION INFORMATION & CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS AND PAPERS PLANNINGTECH@DUSP 2011 Friday, April 8, 2011 11:30 AM – 6:00 PM Location: MIT Building 9 DESCRIPTION New technologies are transforming how we communicate, expanding access to data and […]
Public Sector Innovation: Learning From History
At a conference attended in December on the “Future of the Crowdsourced City” a major topic of discussion was how city governments — or other city organizations — could embrace new technologies. Although nearly 20 years old, I thought this article was remarkably relevant for debates today about how to foster technology-enabled innovation in local […]
Which Crowdsourcing?
I wrote this article for the most recent APA Technology Division Newsletter, which we sent out this week. Other articles include city apps, water quality mapping, TOD database, a VMT estimation tool, and online participation. The expansion of the Internet has made possible amazing examples of the collaboration of large groups of people, a phenomenon […]
Zoning Conflict Heats Up In Cambridge
Exiting the Trader Joe’s near my home in Cambridge recently, I was approached by an intense man who asked: “Are you a registered voter in Cambridge?” He was collecting signatures for a petition that would put a recent zoning amendment adopted by the City Council on the ballot for a referendum. The City Council was […]
Public Sector Crowdsourcing: What’s Possible?
Lately I’ve been involved in a lot of conversations about crowdsourcing in the public sector. Although they’re sometimes confused, in general I think there are two types we can talk about: crowdsourcing policy (or ideas) and public goods (tangible work or services). This is a topic included in my Open Government Strategy for the City […]
Creating the Open City: Part One
This post is the first of a two part series on my work creating an open government strategy for the City of Boston this past summer. During his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama often mentioned expanding civic participation. Solving our toughest problems, he argued, would require action by both government and regular citizens. “The […]
Can We Implement O’Reilly’s ‘Government as a Platform’?
One of the most visible supporters of technical innovation in government recently has been Tim O’Reilly. Perhaps best known for popularizing the term “Web 2.0,†O’Reilly’s media company publishes popular software manuals and organizes industry-leading conferences for Internet entrepreneurs. In the past few years, he’s increasingly turned his attention to applying innovative internet technology to government, […]