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.

Avencia’s Walkshed NYC, which, like its Philadelphia counterpart, allowed users to rate the ‘walkability’ of given neighborhoods by a host of qualities, able to be edited by the user, wasn’t one of a dozen winners or honorable mentions, chosen by public vote and a panel.

Many other cities, Philadelphia included, have discussed internally the possibility of such competitions, though they’ve been hard to come by.

A Brooklyn-based developer won first prize, which includes a $20,000 gift and lunch with the city’s mayor, with his WayFinder NYC, which finds the nearest train stations and gives directions to it.

Can real implementation and change be expected? Is this a novelty or something the city of Philadelphia should seriously consider?

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.

Monday, February 8th: As covered on this very site, Avencia’s Walkshed project covers the “walkability” of our city’s blocks. Creator Aaron Ogle has invited Refresh Philly attendees to Avencia’s office to talk about the project as well as its entry in the NYC BigApps content. Don’t know if you’ve heard, but the last time Philadelphia competed in NYC, it didn’t work out. Why can’t us? 6:30 p.m. Callowhill. DETAILS. [view more events]

Thursday, February 11th: Postponed from last month, the Philadelphia robotics meetup promises “filter based Inertial Measurement Unit code for our Quadrotor controller board.” Yeah, we don’t know either. We’re not going to lie to you though, we were hesitant to recommend the meetup. The last thing Philly needs is the looming threat of robotic-like humans. Plus, we already have Andy Reid’s press conferences. 7:30 p.m. Callowhill. DETAILS. [view more events]

Thrusday, February 11th: If robots aren’t your thing but CSS is, PhillyCHI is hosting design Quizzo at National Mechanics. The group promises questions about “technology, design, architecture, and other related topics.” What that really means, of course, is that you don’t have to bring along your jock friend just for the sports questions. 8:00 p.m. Old City. RSVP. [view more events]

If you have an event that you think we should be listing, email us or fill out our submission form for best results. We promise that no submission falls in to the contact form netherworld.

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.

While it now serves only Philadelphia, Common Cause intends to expand the database to the five-county region and include more original reporting, says James Browning, the direct of development for the group. The profiles of top donors for each elected official is the result of a year-long campaign by the group to make local campaign finance records more accessible, according to a release [PDF].

“Extracting the data from the city’s and the state’s equally crude electronic and paper archives was a job in itself,” Browning wrote in an e-mail to Technically Philly.

Other features are expected to be added to the site in coming months.

Avencia’s Cicero API, which is used to generate the address specific data culling, has made its rounds among political oversight groups.

According to a release: “it currently feeds elected district boundaries and elected official information into several public and private web applications for newspapers, election watchdog groups, philanthropic foundations, unions, arts organizations and private commercial firms.”

Perhaps the clearest example is Avencia’s partnership with the Committee of Seventy on online cudgel: the Redistricting the Philadelphia Region Web site, which lets citizens, “based on their address, look up their political districts, visualize them on a map and learn about the process of redistricting.”

Avencia also recently announced that it has extended ERSI’s ArcGIS Flex API to introduce support for OpenStreetMap, an editable map of the world, in its planning and prioritization software. Read more here [PDF].

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.

Stroll, ranked 62nd, was accompanied by the following four companies: its Callowhill community neighbor Avencia, the geographic analysis and software development firm that was ranked 13th; East Frankford design collaborator and fabrication company Amuneal, ranked 51, and Perryman Building and Construction Services, which was ranked 94th and is based in West Philadelphia at 45th and Market (help me with what neighborhood that is in the comments below).

The Inner City 100 list has no industry specifications, but from Stroll’s Web base to Avencia’s software development and the high-end design and fabrication of Amuneal and growing sustainable requirements of construction for Perryman, all four of Philadelphia’s representatives could be considered members of our region’s creative economies.

Stroll’s neighbor Avencia, no stranger to Technically Philly, was the highest ranked Philadelphia firm, at 13th. Their five-year compound annual growth from 2003 to 2007 was 647 percent. No decimal point needed.

Philadelphia was better represented than each of the five cities with larger populations, see at right. No New Jersey or Delaware companies were listed.

Other cities represented by multiple businesses include Detroit, Miami, San Diego, Baltimore and Buffalo.

Pennsylvania was the third most decorated state with six company nominations; Philadelphia was helped out by two from Pittsburgh. California was by far the best represented state, with 15 companies, followed by Massachusetts with eight.

Collectively, the 2009 Inner City 100 grew at a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent and an average rate of 324 percent between 2003 and 2007. More than 5,000 nominations for the 2009 list were received. The top 100 have employed nearly 17,000 people and created nearly 10,000 new jobs over the past five years.

See additional facts about the annual list here.

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.

The Philly election data is a sample of what KIF can do — showing off the heavy software for potential buyers. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is using KIF to analyze juvenile delinquency data, and Temple University’s Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project has crunched its own collected social data that was formerly stuck on paper only.

Some of Avencia’s clients keep their data in-house, but others use KIF to put their data into the world, Fretz says.

KIF provides many options for interpreting the data, from visualizing election results on a map which enables users to detect spatial patterns in candidate performance, to using a table or viewed as statistical summaries and compared through ranked lists of results.

Avencia says the tool’s Philly election sample has its own host of values, from lessening the burden on election commissioners to helping grassroot political organizations and campaigns.

The company’s DecisionTree geographic planning and prioritization software has also been used to enable campaigns to prioritize canvassing by using data.

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.

Cicero can be used to generate district maps that show how an address fits into the political geography of the country and more than 100 cities nationwide. Read up on why they’re using the API platform.

The most recent upgrades to the Web service and database include faster map generation, new foreign countries, non-legislative boundaries like school districts and watersheds and the inclusion of several new city council districts from places as profoundly interesting as Orlando, Florida; Tulsa, Okla.; Berkeley, Calif., and, yes, high rolling Atlantic City.

These additions coincide with a loss of local legislative information nationwide, Philadelphia most certainly included. In February, we editorialized on the need for a Web-based local government database after the shuttering of Hallwatch.org. We’ve also seen a complete halt in the once exploding Harrisburg-based state government reform movement.

No one has found that purest use for the Cicero API but not for lack of interest. Avencia boasts that many established organizations and agencies are already using the API, a number of which are regionally based.

The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance created a plugin to its advocacy software to immediately know which of their supporters are constituents of what legislator. When they want their voice heard, they can mobilize a targeted group of voters and make sure those representatives hear it.

But Avencia and their Cicero API are hardly local only.

On last election day, Nov. 4 2008, Avencia says the Oregonian used the API to let their readers match their address to live vote counts for important political races in the legislative districts relevant to their address.

It was local and geographically relevant.

Now that’s news.

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.

Monday, April 6: Refresh Philly will be eschewing their normal meetup for a happy hour social at National Mechanics. Join the oft-crowded bunch for drinks and meets at the popular Old City digs. There is homework though, kiddos. Bring your best ideas for ways in which Philly could be improved by design and technology. Oh, and take our advice: some of the best ideas come after tasty beer and cocktails. 6:00 p.m., Old City. RSVP. [View more events]

Tuesday, April 7: If maps are your thing, or you’re just looking to get started in GIS, Net Tuesday Philly will have Robert Cheetham, founder and president of Avencia, a No Libs-based software design company that develops geographic analysis tools and services for government, nonprofit, commercial and research organizations. Cheetham has used his GIS background as an employee for the City of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Police Department and gets around on the lecture and research circuit—he’s been involved with Penn and Penn State University. He’ll be there to discuss ways to better non-profits with mapping. Don’t fret, for-profit orgs. We’re sure there will be value information to go around for non-non-profits, as well. 6:00 p.m., Old City. RSVP. [View more events]

Wednesday, April 8: Brian Frantz and Jon Graves of Center City West-based The Neat Co. (makers of popular and unique scanning software for receipts, business cards, and more), will be speaking at the Foundation Series Workshop, discussing ways to create the cleanest object-oriented code around. Learn how to follow S.O.L.I.D. design principles so you can keep your aesthetic principle and deliver Clorox-coated code even on deadline. 6:00p.m., Fort Washington, Montgomery Co. Details. [View more events]

Thursday, April 9: The hosts of NJ and Philly Tech say that their meetup is growing, so maybe it’s time to take the ride over the Ben Frank to Cherry Hill to see what’s going on. Consider it a show-and-tell for startups, investors, entrepreneurs, or anyone just looking to grab a drink with some techies.7:00 p.m., Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Details. [View more events]

Every Monday morning, Technically Philly will preview the best free tech events in Philadelphia and the surrounding region. See others here. Check our comprehensive events calendar here.