I’m stepping out of Code for America at the end of the year. It’s time for some new leadership to continue building the CfA network effect. It’s been a little over a year and half since I got involved in …

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Last night, Github held a thank you party to celebrate a huge milestone, 1 million users. To put that in perspective, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the US employs around 1.3 million software developers. Even factoring in international and …

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I spent the day meeting government officials who staff and manage 311 services in the city of Chicago. This is a great example of what’s right in government service delivery in local governments. 

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Last fall, Luigi Montanez and I were sitting in the auditorium at the International Open Data Conference brainstorming about ways to get developers more interested in civic coding.  He had just completed a whirlwind tour of ruby meetups, conferences and …

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This week, we select finalists for 2012. Over 550 applications came in for just 26 spots in next year’s class.  For me, the response is such a mix of excitement, humility, hopefulness, a little bit of daunting and frankly, a …

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This past cycle, we took a stab at collecting all the Twitter handles for cities and counties in ShortStack, our knowledge base of local governments. Out of 1293 accounts across 810 cities and counties (that we found), here’s the top …

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I’ve been working lately on a labs product called ShortStack (code). The idea behind it is simple. Can we aggregate information about a city’s technology stack?  For instance, if we know a city website, can we scrape it for data …

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On Sunday, Joel Mahoney and Talin Salway competed and won in the Work 2.0 challenge hosted by API teams from Cotweet, Yammer, Podio, Jexy, Cohuman, and Mashery. Their concept HubBuds is a mashup of the Github and Yammer APIs.  It …

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During the month of February, our fellows literally hit the streets interviewing block watch captains, neighborhood leaders, mayors, IT staff, stakeholders, city department heads, community organization leaders and developers. Over 28 days, 20 fellows interviewed 440 people in 279 interview sessions, which equated to about 10 a day.

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As part of our continued push to understand city governments, we invited Charles Blanchet, VP of Sales at Granicus to present the geek’s guide to selling to government. Founded nearly 10 years ago, Granicus enables web streaming and related transparency …

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