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Tag Archives: city government

Code for America 2012 fellows meet OpenAccessPhilly stakeholders

Three new fellows for the citizen hacking group Code for America were introduced Tuesday to OpenAccessPhilly stakeholders to kick-off their year with the City of Philadelphia.

OpenAccessPhilly, a public/private stakeholders group convened by the City of Philadelphia, worked with the inaugural Code for America fellows last year. Nearly 30 OpenAccessPhilly members, including city employees and other technologists, met in the PhillyStat Room in the Municipal Services Building Tuesday evening. The internal meeting was followed by a good old fashioned happy hour at Ladder 15 on Sansom Street.

All of the CFA fellows, Michelle Lee, Elizabeth Hunt, and Alex Yule, chose to spend their Code for America year in Philadelphia — Technically Philly wrote more about the trio here. Hunt said she chose Philly because the city demonstrates “the most focus on civic engagement.”

Philadelphia is the only participating CFA city to welcome fellows in each of the program’s first two years.

“Philadelphia was chosen for a second term because of the strength of its partnerships,” said Lee. “Particularly in city government.”

Nutter to Chamber: Move beyond the U.S., “we need to market ourselves globally”

The City of Philadelphia isn’t another rust belt city and shouldn’t be treated like one. That about sums up the wide-ranging, tone adjustment that served as Mayor Nutter’s Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce annual mayoral luncheon address Monday.

“We can no longer measure ourselves as compared to other cities in the Mid-Atlantic or even throughout the United States,” said Nutter, before polite applause from the several hundred suited chamber members. “We need to market ourselves globally.”

Referencing Rome and Paris more than he mentioned Chicago or Baltimore, the half-hour speech, which addressed development, investment and a stake in the ground for Philadelphia as international city, featured a call that the technology and startup community is a means to continue to change perception. Read a transcript of the speech here.


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Saskia Thompson: “I’m not a data geek, I’m a city geek” says City of Philadelphia property data chief [Q&A]

It’s not about the data. It’s about the city.

Saskia Thompson

So says Saskia Thompson, who later this month will celebrate one year in her role as the executive director of the newly created City of Philadelphia Office of Property Data.

Her job is to square a dozen or more efforts and uses and agencies that track and rely on city address details — think permits from L&I and billing from utilities. The problem is that through the years, different city departments created their own processes and technologies, so whenever the U.S. Census comes around or the city wants to update its property tax assessments, there is a giant headache.

Oh, and then there is the ongoing issue of how many vacant properties are in the City of Philadelphia.

That will be in the hands of Thompson, a Detroit native (where she started her city government career) and University of Michigan graduate, who is serious and measured in conversations with Technically Philly, contrasting with her relative youth, punctuated by bright blonde hair.

Thompson, 42, who spent the better part of a decade working for Charlotte, N.C.’s city manager, is the steward of a project that she says began in earnest in 2009.

“There was an ad hoc group around the city that got together to say that the flow and the accuracy of property data is not what we’d like it to be,” Thompson said during a December interview in her small office in the Municipal Services Building across the street from City Hall. In 2010, six months after the ad hoc group led some departmental interviews and best practices research, the group gave recommendations to the mayor and managing director.

“The bottom line was that there was no real ownership of property data,” said Thompson, who lives in University City. “A number of agencies create it or use it or both, but we don’t have named data stewards for each property attribute that everyone in the city relies on.”

Thompson sought out a gig with the City of Philadelphia for as much as a year before the right gig opened up, she said, adding that after Detroit and her time in Charlotte, she wanted to work on the bigger stage of a large Northeast corridor metropolis.

She’s gotten her wish.

Housed in the Finance Department, which is also charged with the boondoggle of property tax assessment, Thompson first brought on a small additional staff last October and may do more. To do this right, she says, it will be another year before implementation of a solution begins.

Below, Thompson talks to Technically Philly more about her goals and why she’s not a data geek.


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Al Schmidt: new reform GOP city commissioner talks about changing Board of Elections [Q&A]

New City Commissioner Al Schmidt ran on a campaign of reform for the beleagured Board of Elections.

When Al Schmidt first walked into his first elected public office as a new City Commissioner, he said it was like walking into a time machine.

Often criticized for being among the least transparent offices in Philadelphia, the Board of Elections has received an injection of new blood this year, with two new, reform-minded candidates winning seats.

Democrat and former mathematician Stephanie Singer shook the city’s political machine by besting the 36-year entrenched, if damaged, Marge Tartaglione, and then coasting through the general election. Because the city charter mandates one of the three Board of Elections seats be reserved for the minority party, Schmidt was caught in a testy battle with aging incumbent Joe Duda, from a decidedly different Philadelphia Republican Party since his election in 1995.

In the end, Singer and Schmidt, who ran similar campaigns on embracing web transparency and technology innovation for the office, won out, joining incumbent Democrat Anthony Clark.

“In Philadelphia today, the divide is less between the Democrats and Republicans, and more between the machine and the reform candidates,” said Schmidt. “The trouble is that some are good at pretending to be both.”


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Code for America 2012 Philadelphia fellows announced: Elizabeth Hunt, Michelle Lee, Alex Yule


After being among the inaugural city governments partnering with the Code for America program, the City of Philadelphia is starting another cycle.

From 550 applicants, there are 26 Code for America 2012 fellows to be broken into teams for eight partnering cities this year. This month, the fellows are in San Francisco in a CFA bootcamp before landing in their cities for the month of February for research and finishing out the year back on the West Coast building and working with the city from afar.

Though they don’t land until Feb. 1 and Technically Philly will speak to them in greater detail, here’s an introduction to the three 2012 Philadelphia fellows. (Remember the 2011 fellows here.)


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Jim Querry: City of Philadelphia GIS is among country’s best, part of open gov future [Q&A]

Jim Querry at center, with the City of Philadelphia Office of Innovation and Technology GIS services group that he leads, including, starting at his right, GIS specialist Sarah Cordivano, GIS manager Brian Ivey, GIS application developer Adam Conner and system and database manager Julia Jia

In 1996, when Jim Querry started at the then called and still evolving Mayor’s Office of Information Services, there was a single Internet connection, an Apple dial-up tool at 1234 Market Street.

“That’s where you met to get on the web,” he said.

Fifteen years ago, Querry, who now leads the city’s geo-spatial information systems group that is responsible for mapping, tracking and evaluating city services, was joining an effort by some in the city to get ahead of what was already being billed as the digital revolution, a chance to bolster transparency and efficiency of government systems.

The Planning Commission, Querry said, led the charge to put the City of Philadelphia in a position to be setting the standard for what municipal use of GIS could yield.

To create the foundation on which the city’s crime analysis evaluations, trash collection routes and 311 complaint locations are determined, early city leaders chose platform tools from Calfornia-based Esri, now the global gold standard for GIS products. After early hesitance, Philadelphia became a leader in publishing its longitude and latitude-based map layers to state clearinghouse PASDA. By 2000, the city had won the prestigious Esri President’s Award, an honor again earned in 2008 — a two-time win that no other organization or level of government has yet duplicated.

Though other big cities have caught up in the GIS space in the last 10 years and the surging open data movement has captured public attention in other ways, Querry says the City of Philadelphia maintains some of the most dependable map layers around.

If accuracy is at the heart of making impact with data, then, Querry might argue, Philadelphia has a lot of reason to be a leader again.

Below, Querry speaks to Technically Philly, flanked by his young, four-person team, about the past, present and future of city GIS.


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Gov Fresh Awards 2011: Philly runner-up as City of the Year, wins in four categories

The City of Philadelphia was named a runner-up as City of the Year and was represented in several other categories by other initiatives in the 2011 Gov Fresh Awards, celebrating open government initiatives.

The honors, offered by the three-year-old online news site, followed an outpouring of support in online voting and final decisions by a panel of judges. The City of Philadelphia, which had almost double the number of online votes of second place New York City, lost to the 67th ward after judging and was tied in a runner-up slot with Chicago.

Local data catalog OpenDataPhilly.org won in two categories — Best Government/Citizen Collaboration and Best Open Data Platform — the Code for America team-built ReRoute.It won Best Transit App and the recently unveiled Sheltr.org won Best Social Services App. Runner-up nods were given to ElectNext for Best Civic Startup and Septa.mobi, built by the Devnuts crew.

Updated: As noted in the comments, also the Azavea-built DistrictBuilder tool was a runner-up for the Best Use of Open Source.

How the City of Philadelphia spends $3.5 billion annually: 10 best charts and graphs

How the City of Philadelphia spends $3.5 billion annually should be better visualized online, we say.

The state-empowered Philadelphia Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority (PICA), which is chaired by investor and former mayoral candidate Sam Katz, released in November a citizen’s guide to the City of Philadelphia General Fund that was full of visualizations — all buried in a PDF.

While we shared the document a few weeks ago, after seeing it on PhillyDeals, it seems that it all passed with too little fanfare. While we at Technically Philly would love to work with PICA to develop a friendlier, more interactive web version of this project, we thought we’d start by sharing our 10 favorite of the many charts and graphs detailing where the city government gets its money and how it’s spent.

In addition to the one above, see our 10 favorites below.


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Nutterbook: blog from Conrad Benner tracks the hilarious, absurd comments on Mayor Nutter’s Facebook page

If nothing else, a hastily launched blog can speak to a moment in time.

This weekend, local street artist devotee Conrad Benner launched Nutterbook, which highlights the more memorable comments on Mayor Michael Nutter’s Facebook page. Simple enough that it might be confused with the inane, instead, Nutterbook is a fun way to follow a communication tool still in its infancy, said Benner, 26, who also runs StreetsDept.com, dubbed the ‘Huffington Post of Philly street art‘ and made famous for following a subway ‘yarn-bombing.’

Visit Nutterbook here.


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Code for America: impact of the inaugural fellowship

Inaugural Code for America Philadelphia fellows with Mayor Michael Nutter in February 2011.

The inaugural fellowship year of Code for America is over.

The experimental program that offered chosen cities a team of coders for a year to create open source products that make government more efficient, transparent or ideally both will be back in Philadelphia in 2012, making it the only city to participate in the organization’s first two years. The seven fellows dedicated to Philadelphia this year started in January with an orientation in San Francisco and spent the month of February here, before spending the rest of the year building back on the West Coast.

The City of Philadelphia paid $225,000 for the privilege, which covered stipends for the fellows and was supplemented by foundation and private money. Throughout the process, city and CFA officials were insistent on the fact that the benefit far exceeded the total covered by participating cities: CFA Executive Director Jen Pahlka has put the total consulting value at closer to $1.5 million for each city.

CFA fellow and former Azavea developer Aaron Ogle, who says he is returning to his adopted home of Philadelphia from the West Coast following the fellowship, provided Technically Philly an overview of the largest projects his team completed:


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