We started the week out talking about hackathons in Detroit, and we’ll finish the week the same way, although #hack4detroit has a twist: Participants are using the city of Detroit’s open data portal to create apps that will benefit city residents or help streamline operations.
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Read More… from Michigan: #Hack4detroit Seeks to Improve City Services Through Open Data Portal
SANTA MONICA—On June 9, the City of Santa Monica won a Technology Solutions award from the Public Technology Institute for its Open Data Initiative.
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Read More… from California: Santa Monica Wins Award For Open Data Initiative
We’ve been framing the debate between openness and privacy the wrong way.
Rather than positioning privacy and openness as opposing forces, the fact is they’re different sides of the same coin – and equally important. This might seem simple, but it might also be the key to moving things forward around this crucial debate.
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Read More… from In The Information Debate, Openness and Privacy Are The Same Thing
Hackers are not usually associated with the civil sector, but a hackathon organized by the Civic Data Alliance on Saturday brought together coders, designers and non-profits to create data projects for the public good.
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Read More… from Kentucky: Louisville hackers code for public good
The Department of Health and Human Services last week unveiled a redesign of its data repository, HealthData.gov.
The site aims to make government health-related data sets more accessible to the public for analysis; the new HealthData.gov migrated old content to DKAN, an open-source, Drupal-based platform built by NuCivic, a tech company based in New York. Continue>>>
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Read More… from US Government’s Health Data Website Gets a Refresh
Government data is changing what we know about the work doctors do, and is giving developers the ability to transform that data into useful tools.
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Read More… from How government data is changing the way we understand health care
While not the only source of open data, government can play an important wider supporting role, no matter who manages or provides the information beyond the General Election, argues Open Data Institute technical director Jeni Tennison.
Government collects, maintains and provides access to a whole range of data. It manages information to aid decision making, including geospatial data, the census and crime surveys.
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Read More… from Opinion: How can government support open data without doing it all itself?
The push for open government and open data by federal officials, as well as authorities across many states and cities, can seem an unmitigated good. Talk to journalists, however, and there are myriad areas where they believe government at all levels is still being less than transparent — and less than helpful in revealing facts that the public is entitled to know.
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The Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins, established with a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, aims to assist more than 100 U.S. cities in creating data infrastructures to transform the way their governments operate. The center is part of the university's 21st Century Cities Initiative, a university signature initiative that brings together city leaders and top researchers to confront the pressing needs of revitalizing cities throughout the country and abroad.
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Read More… from New Johns Hopkins center to promote data-driven local government
Plodding along seemingly slower than desert tortoises that spawned the dispute between Bunkerville rancher Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management more than 20 years ago, the BLM has finally provided a watchdog group with a few dozen pages of documents under a Freedom of Information Act request.
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Read More… from New documents reveal little about 2014 Bundy-BLM clash
