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.”

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,” tweeted:

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.

“One of the best things to happen to Philly over the last decade has been the growth of organizations that bring big thinkers together such as our own Philly Startup Leaders,” tweeted:

It was the first time tweeted:

“But not the last,” she added.

Soon after 2 p.m., a crush of bankers, lawyers, nonprofit leaders and other corporate managers hit the escalators and spilled out of the Center City Sheraton at 17th and Race streets. The broad business community hasn’t always agreed with the administration, though Chamber chief Rob Wonderling lauded the mayor in his introduction. Still, a different tone is taken by some in the narrow technology business community, according to at least one voice.

“I really think you’re going to see a focus on entrepreneurship and economic development in his second term,” said Bob Moul, the recently named CEO of AppRenaissance and Philly Startup Leaders chief who Nutter mentioned as a model for the city’s future. “It’s an exciting kind of progress.”

Other news from Nutter’s speech:

• Comcast Executive Vice President and Chamber board chairman David L. Cohen kicked off the event by tweeted:
  .
• New Urban Outfitters CEO Richard Hayne was awarded the $100,000 Powell prize, which he donated to Drexel University.
• Mayor Nutter tweeted:
  .
• Among other development claims, Nutter pledged movement on three long-stalled efforts: to tweeted:
  of the Divine Lorraine Hotel and to move forward the revitalization of Market East.
• Among other broader efforts, he discussed the expansion of the Philadelphia International Airport.

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.

Edited, as always, for length and clarity.

Let’s start by defining what success is for this project.

Success is a couple of things.

It will have named data stewards for each piece of data and a clear process for tracking and maintaining changes. We don’t have that now. We have people working very hard every day to get this right, but it’s pretty much on an ad hoc basis. We need a much more formalized process.

[Secondly,] the ultimate success is that we know our data is trustworthy, transparent, easily accessible and it’s very customer friendly. I am a huge fan that government should be transparent and our data should be public, but we need to be on the forefront of doing that. The reason we’re not is not because we don’t want to share, it’s because we want to make sure what we share is accurate and want to do so in a responsible way.

What is the strategy for bringing together a mess of different processes around city property data?

There are a couple of theories of how you do this, one is the scorched earth theory, where you just take everyone that touches  the data and consolidate that into one department in one and place and we just start over. I’m not saying we wouldn’t do that at some point, but I felt like it wasn’t the place to start.

We don’t have the luxury of starting from zero. Work has to be done every single day. People are using this information. The data, while we know it isn’t perfect, isn’t so bad that services aren’t being delivered.

So I was interested in finding a way to do this while we do our other functions. And I knew we couldn’t get it done to make the property assessment deadline of 2012, so I proposed that we need a very small team to start with to to a deep dive of business process mapping in every department that touches every attribute across the city because we can’t fix this with technology alone.

There will be a technology component but that is going to come later.

This is essentially about how we do the work, who is responsible for which component. Who owns addresses? Who maintains the streets center line? How are changes to all of those data tables transferred and where is the chain of command to make a change and implement a change? All of those things to me may seem like technology is really about how we get the work done.

A year later, where is this effort?

I proposed a really deep dive effort — we’re still a few positions short — and [in December] we started the site visits to those that touch data.

What is the timeline and the ultimate goals we can look for?

The only timeline I’m willing to talk about now is the research and design phase. I’m not sure what implementation is going to look like. People want quick wins for obvious reasons, but we need to see… for example, it is possible we may need legislative changes in order to do this in a different way. We certainly know there are policy changes. And, of course, everything I’m talking about here involves a people component and to do that, it takes time.

So I expect to spend about six months doing the research phase and then a three to six months phase to design our solution.

Now, if we find some low hanging fruit that is more easily fixable, we aren’t going to wait to do that, but I’m not going to set a timeline for implementation until we’ve really done our homework.

And the other thing is I have no idea how much it is going to cost. There will be a technology component, there will be changes to our software, so we need to see the costs. Some of this might get done as we make other upgrades.

For example, we know we have an old mainframe at property assessment that needs a real robust CAMA system. Changes that we’re talking about, we may decide it doesn’t make sense to change other systems as part of another implementation, and that’s just an example.

Just to clarify, you’re saying that a year from now, we’re going to have the research on what is involved and a rough concept of what the solution is going to be.

Yes. And we would have a timeline for implementation.

Does this include the ever-present vacant property conversation?

Definitely related, now there are multiple efforts on vacant property because people are trying to tackle different things. But, yes, this is definitely a part of that.

The real hurdle remains the definition of a vacant property — is it Water Department turn offs or something else.

Yes, and so there is a committee, more than one, and the city is trying to determine its role. The city has a role in managing vacant property, but we’re also not the only player when it’s a property we don’t own. There are multiple efforts that are probably related, but we are not leading them, though we will be part of them.

Then talk a little bit about what data are we specifically talking about.

Think of all the attributes that touch a piece of property.

There’s the address, some cases there are multiple addresses. Our addresses don’t necessarily match Postal Service addresses, and they don’t necessarily need to. We use addresses for different reasons. We need to know where services are delivered, we need to know where it’s located, like street information and block ranges.

Think of all the things that touch property history, ownership, zoning and things like we want to be able to have a history of an address and have all outstanding permits that have been assigned to that address.

Our permit database — and we have one, we know what permits are assigned to an address – - but there’s no way to easily coordinate that, like how 911 routes police and fire or medic to an address. They are coming from completely different data tables.

Consolidation is a touchy subject at the City of Philadelphia, do you see your office owning this data?

I’m not saying that OPD is going to own it. That’s probably not the best way because we’re not the closest to this, what I am saying is that we will be in the centralized coordinating role and setting some standards for how these things are done and making the transition across the board.

Property data is an important type of city information, but certainly not the only one. Do you expect to take over other roles with city data?

I don’t know what this is going to look like in the end state. This is no different than a whole host of efforts in the city that involve business processes so we can optimize our data to have an integrity and translate that across units and the public.

Our focus is on property data. I hope that our process is repeatable for anything else we work on.

Do you at least picture coming out of this finding other dependable data sources that can be shared, outside of property or other ancillary benefits?

One of the things that we don’t have is a consistent process for releasing any kind of data. I’d love to see that done. There’s a more seamless way to get information from the city.

When I say there are other efforts going on, [the city is] trying to completely revamp our web process behind the scenes and our presence to the public, so how data becomes public is a part of many goals that are important.

Do you have a personal interest in data?

I’m not involved in this because of the data. I’m involved in this because I believe in making government as efficient as we can and moving it into at least the 20th century.

This is the third city I’ve worked for, and I like how cities work, I like the operations. There ‘s no other corporation that has as many core services as the city does.

Most corporations have three or four things they are responsible for and that’s it. The city is responsible for hundreds of core functions that if we quit doing, you would hear about it.

And so I come at it from that perspective. I want the city to be more responsive because I think they’re great places to live. Every city has its own culture and its own unique vibe and that’s how I got involved in it.

I’m not a data geek, I’m a city geek. I want to make the city work better.

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.”

Not only is the culture of the office one in need of updating, so too is the physical City Hall office space, Schmidt said, noting that it looked “like nothing had changed in decades.”

To be fair, when he first walked into the office on Jan. 3, there were four or five computers there.

“But they never had an internet connection or even word processing software,” said Schmidt, laughing with a degree of incredulity. “They might as well have been poorly performing lamps.”

It shows how much Schmidt and Singer have to do to meet many of their promises.

Another story line exists with Schmidt, who lost a spirited 2009 campaign against City Controller Alan Butkovitz. With a few of the Republican City Council candidates, he represents a divide in the local GOP between an old guard that has focused on a small, if stable, slice of the pie for patronage jobs, and a newer reform movement that hopes to run competitively in citywide elections.

An educated former performance auditor from the federal Government Accountability Office, Schmidt 40, who is married and has two daughters in East Falls, is bright, cheery and prepared. Earlier this month, Pittsburgh-bred Schmidt sat down with Technically Philly to discuss his campaigns and plans for his new office.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

Give us the quick pitch on what your new job is.

The three city commissioners sit on the Board of Elections to decide matters before the election board, from polling place changes to much bigger things. They run the election machinery in the city.

The Board of Elections has roughly 100 full-time civil servant employees and an approximately $10 million budget, with offices in City Hall, at Delaware and Spring Garden and a warehouse in North Philadelphia. So it is an organization and operation that you’re running, and much like agriculture or farming, there is a time when you’re sowing and a time when you’re reaping.

You have two elections every year, a general and primary, whether it is federal or municipal only, so there’s always activity that takes place every year, but sometimes there are different things that occur. There is a voter ID bill being discussed in Harrisburg, that’s something new this year. There is another bill that would change how names appear on the ballot, having them rotate rather than some candidates just getting stuck with a low position. Special elections, we’ll have some of those this year. Those are examples of things that come up that we decide.

There’s no redoing elections. There’s zero room for error. That’s what makes this so critical.

Remind us of what you campaigned on and why you think it worked.

There were a couple of core principles that we ran on that we thought the office could benefit from.

One was greater transparency in terms of voters and people interested in getting involved in civic life in the city and having access to the information to make the most of it, including people who want to run for office, because it shouldn’t just be someone who is connected to some ward office.

Another element was accountability. There were previous Controller audits and other reports, including from Inquirer and the Daily News, that consistently pointed out its lack of accountability for how it spends its money and its responsiveness.

And to improve efficiency. Elections in Philadelphia cost more than any other county in the state, and it’s more than twice the average of any other county. It costs $10 per voter to run an election in Philadelphia and that’s more like $4 or $5 in the rest of the state.

Sure, but large cities present problems in terms of population and access that can drive up cost.

Well,yes, but it’s high in terms of the amount spent per voter when compared to other big cities too, so something is wrong there. But because [previous commissioners] weren’t transparent about how they spent their money, we don’t know what’s wrong until we’ve come into office. So we have a lot of work to do.

We’ve seen the reform movement in citywide offices happen before, perhaps most famously in the 1950s, so why do you think this resonated now?

My background is in political history — I have a Phd in political history — so you have different types of moments and sometimes they catch fire and sometimes they don’t. For example, there are plenty of things in city government to be outraged about every day and every year, like DROP which really captured people’s attentions and has had a significant impact on the results of elections, and other things are at least as abusive in terms of use of taxpayer dollars, but they never catch people’s interest. So you try to raise awareness of what you can, and see what interests.

I’m obsessed with Richardson Dilworth, Clark and that whole phase: they had been losing for 12 years before they were successful in the face of a Republican Party in this city that had once outnumbered Democrats 12 to one. Now, Democrats outnumber Republicans six or seven to one. I’m not suggesting that any change in the city either with our party or in city government will be easy but you’re certainly not going to succeed if you don’t try.

With a reform Republican breaking into a Democrat/Republican machine commission, the Clark-Dilworth comparisons are inevitable, but the difference, of course, is that whenever we have a seen a big watershed change in registration locally, it has at least nearly mirrored something happening nationally.

The Democrats had the wind at their back and the New Deal was going on, so the migration of African-Americans not only to Philadelphia from the South but also from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party…

So that changes a lot, but there are some notable people trying to reshape the GOP locally. Can a change really happen locally without a national trend to push it along?

Well, you just don’t know. I don’t want to overdo the Dilworth thing, but it’s not like when Dilworth is starting out that Dilworth knew there would be a New Deal or that African Americans would defect en masse from the Republican Party.

You just don’t know what’s around the corner. Now, there’s no sense whatsoever that there is going to be a change to the city that would be parallel to the Dilworth-Clark era. This is not going to be a Republican city in the foreseeable future. The Republican Party registrations have been declining for years and plummeting years ago. That has caused strife within the local Republican community.

One last politics question, in terms of being a different breed of local GOP candidate in a heavily Democratic city, do you see your role to make your party affiliation more palatable to more progressive voters in Philadelphia or to make party affiliation less important overall by suggesting it’s an outlier?

At least the way I’ve conceptualized it, we want a Republican reform taking place and Democratic reform taking place in the city. The objective is to improve and reform city government. The objective isn’t partisan. If we do the best job we can do, there will be a partisan benefit to it. But if you look at it through a strictly partisan effort, it won’t work.

Singer is in a different party, and I’m sure there are many things we disagree on, but in terms of city government, there are very few things we disagree on it.

There’s the old saying that there’s no Republican or Democrat way to fix a pothole, well, similarly, elections in Philadelphia are either going to be fair or not be fair, it’s not a Republican thing or a Democratic thing or a Green Party thing. Taxpayer dollars are either spent well or they’re not.

What are you excited about that would interest a technology community?

A lot of the changes are really primitive that still move the agency forward a light year.

Right now, there’s hardly any information available online. Only recently did they put information up on how to register for absentee ballots. Putting up past election results and things like that is primitive stuff but important.

We do look forward to some small innovations like being able to text your address and we can text back the location of a poling place.

When you look at the great work done by the Committee of Seventy, you realize they’ve done it to fill a vacuum left by the city’s commissioners not keeping up with this. Go to Seventy’s website, put in your address and find out where you can vote. It’s not like you have to go to City Hall and look through a big binder to find out where you vote.

They have information on how to run for office, and I think it’s all things the city commissioners should be doing.

What is priority one for you?

There’s one that is immediate and one long term.

The most immediate thing is that we have to propose a budget for our office for city council. There’s very little time. In past, the budget hasn’t been very transparent. We want to do more.

How?

Not just how much you have to spend, but on what.

A budget can be five line items, with $1 million for this and $3 million for that, or you can break that down more. I think City Council deserves that and we should do that.

And what’s the longer term goal?

My background is as a performance auditor. We can find ways to find efficiencies to save money and improve services. I’d like to lead a way to evaluate the entire office. There are many civil servants there who work very hard and know what they’re doing, but I suspect there are ways to further improve services and save money.

I think it’s foolish to just rush in and make changes.

Just because you win an election, doesn’t mean you’re right and know everything about how to improve performance.

So taking a little more deliberate approach to do the changes right is what that performance evaluation will be intended to assist with.

How would you judge success at the end of your term?

One thing we did from the start after election was form a a transition committee and one of their responsibilities was to assemble our commitments during our campaign, so now it’s important to look to those as a touchstone for as much as warranted for delivering on what we promised. Some may be impractical, but I doubt it and believe we’ll be able to follow through.

Two new faces on a three person panel, and Commissioner Clark wasn’t exactly out campaigning, so I doubt you know each other well. Will the three of you go out and get beers?

[laughs] Well, the Sunshine laws prohibit us from discussing business privately, but we can get together to discuss the Eagles but nothing before the commission.

What was the relationship between the commissioners in the past?

Marge Tartaglione made decisions and two other commissioners placed temporary employees, since the board hires a significant number of temporary employees before and during elections.

Is there water cooler talk in your offices?

It’s not like the City Council can go around and talk about issues, it’d be in violation of Sunshine Laws. though that seems difficult, it is in place for a good reason, to ensure transparency. Small matters like internal office needs can happen in executive session, but otherwise, we don’t talk about high-level matters.

….We’re going to do good work, and the voters will be able to know about it.

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.)

Elizabeth Hunt is a user experience strategist and designer. Elizabeth has worked with top digital agencies and has designed online and mobile experiences. During the past ten years, she has worked for companies such as American Express, Microsoft, and Target. Elizabeth earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of New Mexico. @ezoehunt

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.

Edited for length and clarity.

When did the city’s GIS program begin?

GIS started as roughly a departmental effort in the early 1990s. In the mid-1990s moved to the enterprise, the city level. The first big milestone was lifting our very first central server so there was equal access to data.  Before that, everything was done through Unix, and so if you didn’t know what a Unix mount was, you didn’t have access to data.

Putting it all in one place in warehouse and giving everyone access to it in the city was a big step forward, that moved us into the true enterprise into the late 1990s…. Since then, the focus has been creating ways for more people to access this information.

How advanced was the City of Philadelphia?

We were leading the charge in municipal GIS, but everyone was at a different point and people caught up very quickly in the last decade. There was probably a point where we were out front in the late 1990s, but you saw other municipalities investing in GIS and then everyone in the last decade, so quickly most were on a level playing field.

We have done things over the last 10 years that I think set us apart from other municipal organizations, but others have too. Everyone has their own strength.

For Philadelphia to have launched efforts to digitize GIS so early, there must have been a champion. Who was it?

The Planning Commission, specifically Dave Baldinger, who was the deputy planning commissioner at the time, started GIS in the city.

They were the first to put the stake in the ground and say Esri was the platform, that IBM ERX was the hardware platform, that they were going to start creating data layers to share with other departments.

One of those layers was street center line, one was parcels, one was zoning, and then as other agencies such as the Streets Department started to get into the game, they took over what fit their business services.

So, the Streets Department took over the street center line and made it arguably the best street center line there is.

What does that mean to be best?

The data model: how spatially accurate and informationally relevant.

Your team is just four people: who is doing all the department-specific data cleansing and lifting?

City GIS is a federated system. You might call it a hybrid federated system.

The departments are really responsible for keeping up data according to their business practices. And we coordinate a lot of that, make it centrally accessible so departments can touch upon each other. We bring departments together and have done so since the mid-1990s to talk about common issues and coordinate.

What’s an example of something your team runs built?

This group is responsible for a number of things: sharing geo-spatial technology across agencies and customer service and helping customers do their business, like an agency like Streets.

So, for example, there’s this application that has been running for a while, it’s called the Guarantee Pavement Information System [that is run by the Streets Dept., but GIS built]. It’s a classic deconfliction application, that gives utilities and data providers a peek into the Streets Department capital program.

Meaning, part of the Streets capital program is that they repave all the streets every 10 years, so they repave one-tenth of the city’s streets each year. So we want to make sure that if you’re a big utility like water or gas, for your capital upgrade, you don’t show up the day after Streets paves that street, so you want to know about that in advance. We run that program and it has been running for about 10 years, which replaced a meeting of department heads to talk about what everyone is doing.

You said every municipality is good at something. How is the City of Philadelphia GIS team best?

We’re good at operations and public works.

What does that mean?

Pretty much things you can kick.

Wastewater and stormwater [impact models], snow routes, where we’re going to plow, and daily collection of trash. Day to day operational things, and then building the workforce on top of that in a reasonably organized fashion.

GIS application developer Adam Conner: I’d say that we’re also ahead of contemporaries with sharing data with something like OpenDataPhilly.org, rather than doing a stale FTP data dump.

What is keeping Philadelphia from being as much a leader with that data release as it was with GIS in the 1990s?

The issues the city has with data, like property data or anything, really comes from antiquated business practices. There are extenuating circumstances agencies deal with that people don’t realize. That’s not an IT problem, that’s a business re-engineering problem.

The new Office of Property Data job is meant to focus on workflows to find out why data is in the state it’s in.

The real answer is that the data developed in silos, using what technology was available a the time. if you could go back and build everything differently, all the data would be a single database.

How have you reacted to the growing interest in city data in recent years?

I’m not surpirsed by the interest. People have been asking for it for years. In the mid-1990s, it was tough to get the city to relase data, but it was 10 years ago we started posting to PASDA, and around then developed a data distribution policy, allowing for sharing information with educational and nonprofits and contractors with the city, but not commercial entities.

That’s what has been changing, opening up the data entirely. We’re sharing all data that departments are willing to share with anyone.

Still, data is one thing, information is another. If you want to know when your trash is going out, you don’t want to download a file with all of the trash days, you want a tool to get you your answer more easily.

Adam Conner: Using PASDA to post snapshots in time of our data and map layers has been great, but the real-time, the updated data tools make a lot more sense and that’s what people want… We want to do more of that too.

What did you think of OpenDataPhilly when you first heard this private collaboration was building a city data catalog? [Full disclosure: Technically Philly was involved in its early strategy]

It seemed like the next generation of things.

The city would never have the resources to pull off that kind of project. We need to focus on helping the customer agencies to do their business services. We need tools that have reasonable performance and are dependable and the data behind it all can be opened up and benefit the city in ways we can’t even imagine right now.

What has had a bigger impact: city mayoral administration changes or technology changes?

During the Rendell administration, the technology was very different obviously than today, and the Street administration was the transition from where we were to where we are now.

..During the Rendell administration, technology was limited to very few users and the drivers were the big business programs in the departments, like the stormwater cost allocation program that was the genesis for the first aerial imaging and plyometric mapping in the city. In the mid 1990s that was new and innovative and now it’s  just common place and expected.

Through the Street administration, it was about getting technology out of the backroom to make it more open and apparent to people, to unify land records databases from a technology standpoint.

Now, the Nutter administration is focused on the business processes, and the technology is almost taken for granted. Really, [Chief Innovation Officer Adel Ebeid's] big charge here is to bring this back around to a fashion that is sustainable and really and push for the funding to do that. We’ve been in a state of deferred maintenance for years. That’s not the sexy stuff, they just want access to it, the running the railroad, as they say.

….Mostly, it’s the technology changes [that move us]. The administrations may change focus, but the access to data, there is still a city charter to pick up trash and find where the bad guys are, so the technology has shifted more than anything.

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 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.

Also see the original PDF here or here (Technically Philly strongly recommends you give the document a look for additional explanation for much of the information below).

REVENUES

Distribution of Fiscal Year 2012 General Fund Revenues

Distribution of Fiscal Year 2012 General Fund TAX Revenues

EMPLOYMENT

How many city employees

Percentage change in city employment by agency

EXPENDITURES

Percent of budget distributed by function

Percent of budget distributed by agency

Comparing the 10 largest U.S. cities by expenditures

TAXES

Tax revenue and rate

Comparing 10 large U.S. cities by state and local tax burden

Comparing 10 large U.S. cities by percentage of tax revenues

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.

“Mr. Nutter is, I believe, the first sitting [Philadelphia] mayor to have a Facebook page, and it’s fun to watch this new forum for democracy take its baby steps,” said Benner, who works as a social media manger for a local ad agency. “I’m sure this is not what the Mayor of Philadelphia’s Facebook page will look like in 15 years, if there even is still a Facebook.”

From non sequiturs like a professed Nutter family member leaving his phone number and asking for a call back to the outrageous and downright spammy, Benner, who says he has been commenting himself on Nutter’s Facebook page for months, says that while many of the less constructive comments appear to be the norm of higher-volume, potentially partisan web traffic, there might be a lesson for the mayor’s communications staff.

“I think it might be interesting for the mayor, or his people, to interact with some of these more serious commenters however,” said Benner, a Fishtown native who attended the Community College of Philadelphia for a few semesters before pursuing other interests. “Right now Mr. Nutter seems to be using the platform to broadcast news and information, but it would be interesting, and potentially very benificial for him, to interact with the commenters. They are, after all, citizens of Philadelphia and potential voters. Perhaps he should see this as a modern day public forum.”

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:

• Change By Us — The local rollout of the civic action crowdsourcing tool was the group’s signature project.
• Welcome America — The city’s annual July 4 celebration got a new website from the CFA fellows.
  
• Philly Goes 2 College — The fellows rolled out a website for the referral center within the Mayor’s Office of Education.
  
• Councilmatic — A nearly year-old hobby project of CFA fellow and Philly native Mjumbe Poe, developed at a CFA hackathon, that is due to be released as a tool to allow residents to more easily track and research city legislation.
• Mural Guide — Ogle and Poe built a web app using the Mural Arts API to map and detail nearby murals.
• PHL API — With the help of hobbyist hacker Mark Headd, a pair of the fellows built a GIS call API during their March hackathon.
• Reroute.it — Fellows built a mobile tool to help offer additional transit options to commuters.
• Septa.mobi — With the Devnuts crew, CFA fellows help with the rollout of the initial version of this real time SEPTA tool.

It’s worth adding that there is real value in the simple perception that Philadelphia is participating in a largely celebrated national, public-private partnership around innovation and city action.

All told an impressive list to be sure, but it’s important to point out that of these eight larger tangible projects, just the first three directly impacted city services (Change by Us has just launched and so has no track record and the next two were basic, if cool, website redesigns to narrowly-reaching city services), one hasn’t been deployed and the other four are relatively small tools with likely little scale.

The value of CFA is clear, and most of the Philadelphia tech community is likely supportive of taxpayer dollars going to this mind share, but there are certainly much bigger IT hurdles to overcome here.