Part of promoting better broadband in Minnesota is promoting better uses of broadband and one of my favorite uses is civic technology – or creating greater opportunities for civic engagement using technology. The easy example (especially given our current winter!) is Adopt-a-Hydrant, a website where residents can sign up to take responsibility for making sure that their adopted hydrant remains accessible. Usually that means shoveling it out after a snowstorm. It’s a huge task for the city to take on shoveling out each hydrant. It’s not so difficult when citizens can volunteer to take on one hydrant. It’s the essence of crowdsourcing – or the old adage many hands make light work. But they only way Adopt-a-Hydrant works is when the developers the website have access to the location of each hydrant. Access to the open data opens the door to greater civic engagement. It’s just one example.
Open data becomes valuable when developers know it’s available and are able to create applications that make the data useful (as happened at the Capitol Code event a couple weekends ago) and when citizens know that the applications are available. There is legislation being introduced to promote and facilitate access to open data and understanding of open government applications. Continue>>>
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