A year in review of the open government movement in Philadelphia from Tropo developer Mark Headd:
Also, O’Reilly Media’s Open Gov correspondent Alex Howard gave a broader year in review, noting Philadelphia’s role in scalable solutions.
[Full Disclosure: Tropo has been a past Philly Tech Week sponsor and this post mentions this reporter.]
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:
The Sheltr.org group, from L to R: Salas Saraiya, Robert Cheetham, Casey Thomas, Cheyne Rood, Mike Ball, Gabriel Farrell and Bula.
Sheltr.org, a mobile-friendly, web application to display nearby housing and food services for needy residents, was the featured tool at Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon held over the weekend at Drexel University.
The tool, built by a volunteer team of seven developers and designers, launched Philly.Sheltr.org, using available homeless intake facility information and a meal-providers data set collected by the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger, said team members.
A representative of the city’s Office of Supportive Housing, who was contacted over the weekend by the team, said the department was interested in supporting the project, which could be used by service providers and the general public to more accurately direct distressed members of the street homeless population.
Sheltr was one of six projects created by nearly 40 participants, which also included non-developers, during the second local version of the global hack weekend led by a smattering of tech giants, like Google, NASA and the World Bank. This weekend, Random Hacks events were held in 34 cities, including Philadelphia. Locally, the event was hosted by Drexel University, led by PhD student Michael Brennan and sponsored by Voxeo Labs, CloudMine and, full disclosure, Technically Philly.
The OpenAccessPhilly public-private, open gov movement highlighted by April’s OpenDataPhilly.org launch, has helped spur another group in Tennessee.
Months after OpenDataPhilly.org was discussed at the Chaos Conference in Berlin, a group of civic hackers and good government-minded officials used the site’s open source framework built by Azavea to launch OpenChattanooga.com.
Visit OpenChattannooga here.
The site was built during the 48 Hour Launch program from the Company Lab this past weekend and organized by Tim Moreland, an analyst with the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Agency, and Teal Thibaud, a communications director at community vision group Chatanooga STAND.
“Right now Open Chattanooga is just a collection of interested individuals without any formalized structure or support. The group consists of city employees, nonprofit organizations, interested citizens, local tech geeks and people in higher education to name a few,” Moreland tells Technically Philly.
City Councilman Bill Green gives the opening address at the 2011 Mobile Apps Forum and Bootcamp
Mobile strategy and penetration are already shaping government, business and content delivery, say a slew of presenters at the 2011 Mobile App Forum and Bootcamp held this afternoon at Temple University.
Organized by Mobile Monday Mid-Atlantic in partnership with two Temple Fox School initiatives, the event was opened by at-large City Councilman Bill Green, who focused on his pet issue: IT-focused municipal government efficiencies. Interspersed with networking sessions in the cavernous, sunlit top-floor conference room of the Fox School’s Alter Hall, Green was followed by two panel discussions on the direction of mobile and related roundtables.
[Full Disclosure: Technically Philly was a media sponsor.]
Mayor's office representative Jeff Friedman and Fuzebox consultant Paul Wright kickoff the OpenAccessPhilly forum.
How technology and civic participation intersect in Philadelphia was the central focus of a forum hosted Friday by the OpenAccessPhilly public/private stakeholders group.
Held at the University City Science Center Quorum space, a variety of city and private speakers gave five minute presentations on the work they were doing relevant to the group’s mission of citizen-driven change infused with technology, part of the evolution of the Digital Philadelphia plan from the city’s IT agency.
Those at the podium included Mayor Michael Nutter, communications director Desiree Peterkin Bell, whom we interviewed Friday, new Chief Innovation Officer Adel Ebeid, Dell Boomi general manager Bob Moul, Independents Hall co-founder Alex Hillman and Azavea president Robert Cheetham, who announced the winners of the OpenDataRace.
Three data sets have been announced as winning the most support in the OpenDataRace, a month-long call for Philadelphians to vote for what nominated city information they most seek.
First place, with 596 votes, went to the Public School Notebook, which called for the National Student Clearinghouse Data for Philadelphia, which tracks college attendance from School District students. The Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia’s ask for police data on reported bike thefts by address came in second, with 553 votes, and a vacant land data request from Conservation Pennsylvania came in second with just 295 votes.
The three nonprofits will be awarded $3,000, $2,000 and $1,000 respectively and, more importantly, the organizers behind the event and OpenDataPhilly.org — Azavea, the William Penn Foundation, NPower and, full disclosure, Technically Philly — will seek out the regular release of these data sources by the city. To be sure, all of this data can be requested on a one-off basis on the grounds of freedom of information act requirements, but the initiative seeks more on-going efforts. See the city’s Open Records law details here [PDF].
Overall, people cast 2,445 votes, and the site’s registered users grew from 222 to 2,628, said Azavea project manager Deb Boyer.
The race had recently been covered by TechSoup, the Philadelphia Business Journal and Generocity.
Cast your vote in the last days of the OpenDataRace, the contest that aims to get a sense of what city data most interests Philadelphians.The voting closes Thursday night.
Vote at opendataphilly.org/contest.
Nonprofits nominated some two dozen data sets related to their mission. Find more background on the contest here.
The top three winners will be announced at Friday’s OpenAccessPhilly forum, and small cash prizes will be given to the related nonprofits.
Then, the contests organizers — Azavea, NPower, the William Penn Foundation and, full disclosure, Technically Philly — will work with the city to highlight methods to release that city data.
Interested in who’s getting arrested in Philadelphia?
Then visit Philly Rap Sheet, “a web scraper that scans Philadelphia’s municipal court system every half hour for new arrests and posts them online,” says the developer, Andrew McGill. “You can filter by date, by bail amount, by crime, by the arresting officer and by the judge.”
Though for now the tool is dependent on court clerks uploading docket sheets, McGill, 23, said “they’re pretty prompt with getting this information online after an arraignment.”
McGill said the city courts online docket sheet database interface is fine for finding specific people but has always come up short in showing any more nuanced requests, like recent arrests or specific crimes on specific days.
Hacks/Hackers, the grassroots national chapter-based organization that brings together journalists and technologists, now has a Philadelphia group.
Hacks/Hackers Philly, organized by Public School Notebook web editor Erika Owens and Azavea GIS analyst Dana Bauer, will host its first meetup next Tues., Oct. 18 6 p.m. at the Municipal Services Building. RSVP here.
“Anyone with an interest in technology and/or journalism should attend, in particular people with ideas, questions, enthusiasm, and persistence,” said Owens. “We’re thinking the first meetup will be a chance for people to get to know each other and learn about the hacks/hackers concept. We want to see what types of things people in Philly are interested in. Do they want to build projects? Do they want to skill share? Both? Something else?”
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