All over the world, groups and individuals are using technology in a variety of innovative ways to increase government transparency, fight corruption, open data, hack on civic problems, strengthen economic development, address environmental problems, improve public health and education, and advance the conditions of women and children.
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Read More… from WeGov – Our name for this trend is “We-government”
In a win for government transparency, a slew of strong new appointments for a city government watchdog group cleared their first round of approvals yesterday.
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Last month, web designer Sean Wittmeyer and colleague Wojciech Magda walked away with a $25,000 prize from the state of Colorado for designing an online tool to help businesses decide where to locate in the state.
The tool, called "Beagle Score," is a widget that can be embedded in online commercial real estate listings. It can rate a location by taxes and incentives, zoning, even the location of possible competitors — all derived from about 30 data sets posted publicly by the state of Colorado and its municipalities.
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A state watchdog group says Philadelphia City Council willfully ignored Pennsylvania’s open-meetings law this past week by gathering behind closed doors — not once, but twice.
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Read More… from Philadelphia City Council Is Ignoring Sunshine Laws, Watchdog Group Says
In its own polite, Midwestern fashion, The Des Moines Register is mad as heck and is not going to take it anymore. After Iowa officials refused to release records showing alleged abuses by state employees, the paper is pursuing dual lawsuits to force the records into public view. In one case, the Register is even suing the state’s new public information board, formed expressly to address years of complaints about records transparency.
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Read More… from Iowa’s largest paper tries to shift the state’s culture toward transparency
California voters handily approved ballot measures Tuesday requiring that local governments pay the cost of making their records and meetings public. Proposition 42, which amends the state constitution to require that governments pay for complying with state transparency laws, led with 60 percent of the vote after 1.8 million ballots counted. It was backed by the state Democratic and Republican parties, taxpayer advocates and labor unions.
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Read More… from Calif. voters approve open government, pass Prop 42
While many of our nation’s problems are quite clear, the way our government addresses them is too often a black box—opaque and closed to all but insiders and lobbyists.
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Read More… from This White House GitHub Experiment Could Help Fix Government
The publication of a new report from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) prompts a quick look at the progress of the Obama administration’s US Open Data Action Plan.
That has its roots in the June 2013 pledge made at the Open Data Charter meeting of G7 leaders to publish a roadmap for improving use of open data as well as Obama’s executive order requiring federal agencies to make government data open and machine readable by default.
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Read More… from Open data making progress at state and government agency level in the US
