Planning Pool

North America is abuzz with “gov 2.0″, an effort to use technology to make government more transparent, participatory and collaborative. All this energy is great news – it leads to innovation, new levels of transparency and public engagement, and makes government more responsive to its customers: citizens. However, most governments are so busy trying to get up to speed that there is little time for learning about existing best practices, tackling challenges in a coordinated way, and working beyond the silos that gov 2.0 is partially trying to address.

Enter Open Gov West. A mix of industry workshop and unconference, Open Gov West the first major open government conference in the Pacific Northwest. Open Gov West will bring together local governments and committed citizens to “facilitate regional collaboration and … Continue Reading

Last month, we updated you about Vancouver’s Open City Initiative and the Beta Open Data Catalogue that had just come online. In a similar fashion, New York City is opening up its public databases, ranging from traffic data to restaurant health inspections and property sales. The project, called NYC BigApps, is a competition that is giving away $20,000 in cash prizes to people who can figure out how to use the data in really interesting and accessible ways. This project sounds great, because not only is the data being made publicly accessible, but the competition is an incentive for people to use the data, making the city more transparent and accountable.

SeeClickFix.com is a new social networking service located in New Haven, Connecticut, that is using the wisdom of crowds to highlight municipal infrastructure problems.

The website is hoping to engage the community by providing tools that increase transparency and communication between residents, governments and organizations. Overall, SeeClickFix.com’s goal is to make it easier for residents to improve their community, using Google Maps.

The best thing about SeeClickFix.com is that it is so easy to use:
See – see a non-emergency issue in your neighborhood
Click – open a ticket describing the issue and what can be done to resolve it
Fix – publicly report the issue to everyone for resolution
The website was started by a group of nerdy software and design entrepreneurs in New Haven who saw the British FixMyStreet.com … Continue Reading