Code for America Philadelphia fellows start work with City: Video interview

Mjumbe Poe, one of the Code for America Philadelphia fellows, speaks with John Mertens looking on. Photo by Nicholas Vadala

Aaron Ogle was quite taken with Philadelphia’s first Deputy Mayor for Public Safety.

“Man, you need a Youtube channel,” Ogle told Everett Gillison in a meeting.

Ogle, 30, is something of the leader of the seven-pack of Code for America fellows that parachuted into City Hall earlier this month.

Ogle, a former developer for local GIS shop Azavea, is one of two Philly natives in this, the inaugural year for an experimental program that offers chosen cities a team of coders for a year to create open source products that make government more efficient, transparent or ideally both.

In January, Ogle and Mjumbe Poe, 27, who was formerly doing contract code work for the University of Pennsylvania, landed in San Francisco to meet their new teammates and more than a dozen other young developers who would be working for the other inaugural CFA cities Washington D.C., Boston and Seattle.

After a month of training in relevant skills, style and city government, all of the fellows are being put up for the month of February in their respective cities. In March, all the fellows will make the pilgrimage back to the CFA headquarters in San Francisco where they will all presumably hold hands, share what they’ve learned and by September have an alpha version of some kind of application.

That’s what brought Ogle, Poe and the rest of the team in the gaze of Gillison.

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MEI hopes Yards Brewery iPad app is a prototype for publishers

Fri., Jan. 14, 12:09 p.m.: Corrected detail about Reader’s Digest app. It is not being created by MEI as originally published.

After making a surprising appearance in Wired in November, it’s maybe less of a surprise that a local brewery is tapping its techie customers.

Late last month, Yards Brewing Company launched a free iPad app, which allows customers to hear the brewing backstory, watch a video with Yards founder Tom Kehoe and explore particulars of the brewery’s selection of beers.

But, let’s be frank—good beer is not a hard sell.

It’s perhaps the production of the app that is more representative of technology’s impact, as a local company with deep roots in the publishing industry is keeping up with the times by shifting its business.

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‘There’s a new breed of software developer helping local government:’ Governing magazine

Governing magazine on Code for America and the movement it represents:

As recently as 2008, few developers were thinking about writing software code, or “coding,” for cities. Now, interest in partnerships between independent software developers and cities has exploded. “This space was totally brand new and early, and it was very, very insidery,” says Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategyLabs, a media agency in Washington, D.C. Corbett is the co-creator of Apps for Democracy, a contest in which developers competed for cash prizes to develop the best apps using city data from the District of Columbia. The first contest, in 2008, produced nearly 50 applications in the course of a month, at a cost of $50,000. The highly publicized event triggered a series of copycat contests in the U.S. and around the globe. MORE

WishGenies uses Facebook Likes and community to help your gift shopping

If you’re still hunting gift ideas for a friend or three, a Facebook application from a local developer hopes to have the answer.

Launched in November, WishGenies is a lightweight tool in beta that leverages Facebook user ‘likes’ and an early-adopting community to offer suggestions.

This author signed in, chose a Facebook friend for whom he was seeking a gift, added some other keyword preferences of my friend and, within six hours, I had three suggestions under my $50 price range. One was a book that this friend has and enjoyed and two others were gifts that, truly, I just might purchase.

The app is from Jeff Deville, a 32-year-old freelance web developer living in Plymouth Meeting. Most suggestions come in within a day, he said.

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Code for America City of Philadelphia fellows and direction announced

The seven fellows who will work on an application to increase communication between the City of Philadelphia and residents as coordinated by the Code for America initiative have been announced recently.

From 360 candidates, a group of 20 were chosen to start in January 2011 training, visiting and then developing products to increase efficiency, productivity and accountability of four inaugural city governments. After a month of meeting with city officials, the seven fellows that Philadelphia has been issued will, like the rest of their colleagues, do their development work in the Bay Area headquarters of CFA.

See the timeline of the program’s inaugural year here. Below, meet Philly’s fellows and read a rough description of what they will be working on.

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Trainboard takes on iSEPTA with regional rail iPhone app

There’s a new SEPTA app in town.

We must confess, ever since iSEPTA, we have been hard pressed to find a Philadelphia transit iPhone application that we would actually, you know, use on a daily basis. As of now, the Apple App store is mostly filled with nationally-focused apps that offer a Philadelphia version, such as iTransitBuddy.

Trainboard (iTunes link), however, is locally produced by Patrick Casady, as Caffeine Fish, out of his apartment near Girard College. Casady maintains the company part-time as a side project.

“New York has really good transit apps, but I looked at Philly’s selection and it sucked,” says the Drexel grad.

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Inquirer, Daily News publisher pledges to charge for iPad application

One year ago, Inquirer and Daily News Publisher Brian Tierney pledged to add a paid-content model to Philly.com by the end of 2009, as we were first to report.

Of course, that never happened and Philadelphia Media Holdings plunged into bankruptcy proceedings. But with another spring, comes another pledge.

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If we could design Philadelphia’s 311 iPhone App

In an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine‘s new Philly Post daily news blog, Technically Philly will be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals every Tuesday. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

Yesterday it was revealed that the City of Philadelphia is developing an iPhone application for its 311 non-emergency call system that will allow users to submit requests for city services using an Apple smartphone.

As city Chief Technology Officer Allan Frank told the Inquirer, users will be able to track and retrieve the same information they can from the city’s 311 telephone service. The mobile interface, though, will allow for more, like snapping a photograph of a pothole to request that it be filled. Frank hopes the application will launch next month as a bare-bones preview of what’s to come, before the “rocket-science stuff.”

Though Frank is vague about the future of the software, we’ve got some initial suggestions for what could be easily (and not-so-easily) implemented and advice for the city programmers tasked with developing it.

Read more at Philly Mag’s Philly Post.

City to release free 311 iPhone application

The City of Philadelphia will release a free iPhone app for its 311 non-emergency call hotline as soon as next month, reports the Inquirer.

City Technology Chief Allan Frank is painting a bold picture for the application, which he tells the Inqy will let users “log requests for city services and track them from their phones.”

“Anything you can do with 311 when you call, you’ll be able to do on your iPhone, and then some. OK, you can take a picture of, say, the illegal dump with the iPhone, and you can geo-locate it for us with the iPhone. All that fancy stuff,” Frank said.

Frank says future edition will become more sophisticated, trumping other cities that have already released similar apps.

Azavea submits BusMinder for Massachusetts Department of Transportation contest

BusMinder, a bid from Azavea for a contest from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.

The story of a government looking for technology to do what it does better is becoming increasingly average.

And Callowhill-based GIS software firm Azavea, which recently changed its name from Avencia, has made it something of a habit of getting involved whether those discussions are happening in Philadelphia or not.

More than a month after chasing New York City’s BigApps contest, an Azavea developer has his eyes set on winning a challenge from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.

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