Open Government Community Organizes California "Roadshow" to Collaborate With City Officials, Citizens on Creating Open Data Policies Across California
This past May, President Obama visited Capitol Factory in Austin, Texas, a civic startup that leverages open government data to create new products. Only a few hours earlier, the president had signed an Executive Order, declaring that going forward, "data generated by the government be made available in open, machine-readable formats, while appropriately safeguarding privacy, confidentiality, and security."
The world is getting hotter. Climate change is a reality that we can no longer ignore. We are seeing rising sea levels, habitat destruction, and unprecedented natural disasters from New Orleans’ Gulf Coast to New York’s Eastern Seaboard. But another devastating consequence of climate change is the effect rising temperatures are having on the overall health of residents in cities, especially amongst at risk neighborhoods and populations.
This past May, President Obama issued an executive order requiring that going forward, any data generated by the federal government must be made available to the public in open, machine-readable formats. And last week, White House officials announced expanded technical guidance to help agencies make even more data accessible to the public.
Have you ever moved to a new city without any idea of what neighborhood would best suit you? What neighborhood has the best public schools for you children, or the safest place to raise a family, or the best access to public transportation? Or maybe you want to know more about the neighborhood you’re already a part of and how you can improve the community that you live in. It is not easy to find a lot of this information in one place. But what if you could pull out your smartphone, enter a street address, and have a rating pop up that could give you all of this valuable information and more? Civic startup, Appallicious has done just that for the City of San Francisco with a brand new app called the Neighborhood Score.
As the United States Congress grinds to a standstill over the state of the economy, gun legislation and general partisan backbiting, we need to take a step back and reflect upon the past for proven solutions for the future. If I asked any of my colleagues in the Government 2.0 industry where, historically, we should focus our attention, few would answer the 1980s given the fact that the Internet wasn’t even invented until the end of the decade.
