The biggest example to date of contest-driven technology submissions for making government better hasn’t gone Philadelphia’s way.
Callowhill-based GIS software firm Avencia was Philadelphia’s lone representative in software application contest NYC BigApps, hosted by that city’ s government and aimed to foster more transparency and accountability. It didn’t turn out as they hoped.
Update, 2/8 9:37 a.m.:Refresh Philly will be held at Avencia’s office at 340 N 12th St Suite 402, not the Comcast Center.
Still recovering from that Super Bowl party you went to last night?
Well, get some coffee and shake off that headache. Our event calendar is packed with worthy events and it would be best if you paid attention.
Start your week off right, and head to Callowhill to see the the map-happy geniuses at Avencia talk about their Walkshed project and the company’s entry into the NYC BigApps contest. On Thursday, Hive76 hosts the Philly robotics meetup and cap your week off by taking PhillyCHI up on its offer of design-focused quizzo.
And, if you’re still feeling some withdraw from football, click through for your event highlights. This time with 60 percent more sports references.
All events listed on the event calendar are free to attend. Be sure to check our complete calendar for more.
The Web was always supposed to be democratic. But for all the good government oversight resources online, local politics often fail to attract the spotlight of transparency.
After Hallwatch went under, Philadelphians were left without a resource for hard data about their elected officials.
It’s an issue that certainly interests nonprofit, non-partisan citizens’ lobby organization Common Cause PA. Enough so that the organization has harnessed legislative data API Cicero, the brainchild of Callowhill GIS development company Avencia, to launch Our Philadelphia. The Web site explores “the role of money in local politics and allow users to investigate these issues for themselves.”
Made possible by the Samuel S. Fels Fund, the site shines the light on local campaign contributions for city legislators. Users can create custom RSS feeds, search by address, as powered by Cicero, and track information and content relevant to other keyword searches.
So, for example, a Frankford resident might find it entirely peculiar that the top contributor to the campaign of his city Councilwoman Maria Quinones Sanchez is energy drink manufacturer Cintron Beverage, to the tune of $21,500.
Stroll’s company mission is nothing short of bold. They want to bring their customers products that are capable of “transforming” their lives.
And the audio-book Web retailer, which saw its revenue triple from 2004 to 2007 and ships mostly self-improvement merchandise, is doing it from 12th and Callowhill.
For that, Stroll is getting some congratulation. Along with three other Philadelphia companies, it was named to the 11th annual Inner City 100, a competitive ranking of the fastest-growing companies located in the “inner city” of a U.S. metropolis, last week. See what constitutes an inner-city here.
Only Denver and Boston, each of which had five companies headquartered there, were better represented. See the complete list here [PDF].
The list comes from the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, a national nonprofit organization founded in 1994 by a Harvard Business School professor. The organization’s mission is to promote economic prosperity in U.S. inner cities through private sector engagement leading to job, income and wealth creation for local residents.
The primary election for a host of local candidates is being held Tuesday — from district attorney to city controller, municipal judges and others.
On the heels of releasing a new version of a subscription-based district-matching and legislative data API, Callowhill geographic analysis and software development firm Avencia released yesterday a free Web-based tool to search and map Philadelphia’s election results from 1992 to 2008 (click at bottom right to proceed anonymously for preview).
The application runs on Avencia’s Kaleidocade Indicators Framework, which enables users to visualize, interpret, and map large data sets. The “Philadelphia Election Results, 1992-2008″ application, the data set includes more than four million records, like the results of elections held in Philly for all state and national offices for those 16 years, along with the results of the 2007 elections for city offices, both at the precinct and the ward levels.
“This is a very important data set, one that doesn’t exist anywhere out there, so we’d like to expand it, by adding years further in the past and continuing to update it,” says spokeswoman Abby Fretz.
Showing Philly's gerrymandered 5th councilmanic district
Updated: 3:51 5/7/09
Here’s a completely uncontroversial statement: the sloppy, meandering legislative districts that are used to keep incumbents in power are an embarrassment to our Republic.
Don’t worry, though, technology is going to solve that, too.
A cool, new version of a free subscription-based district-matching and legislative data API has been released by Avencia, a geographic analysis and software development firm based in the Poplar Callowhill neighborhood west of Northern Liberties.
The new version of CiceroLive, a free sample of the data and mapping tool Cicero API, which pools relevant information about political representatives at all government levels, including the district boundaries for 100 major U.S. cities, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, comes before another likely round of redistricting in 2010, with new Census data arriving then.
This week, there’s a ton of good stuff happening in the community, all listed on our events calendar. On Monday, Refresh Philly is taking a break from its lecture modus operandi to kick back with some beers at National Mechanics. It could be a great way to network with some of the city’s most innovative brains.
Net Tuesday Philly will be focused on GIS and maps this month, and have invited Robert Cheetham, founder and president of Avencia, a No Libs-based geographic software design company that works often with the public sector. Learn how GIS can help your non-profit. And if you’re for-profit, sneak in anyway. You’ll at least be able to ask someone how to work that darned GPS you’ve been toting around.
Brian Frantz and Jon Graves of Center City West-based The Neat Co. will be talking clean code at the Foundation Series Workshop Wednesday night, and Thursday has a burgeoning NJ and Philly Tech meetup. Be there. And by “there,” we mean at every single event.
Events listed in our highlights are free to attend. Please check our Events calendar for more information and read more after the jump.
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