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Zack Quaintance

Zack Quaintance is the assistant news editor for Government Technology magazine. His background includes writing for daily newspapers across the country and developing content for a software company in Austin, Texas.

The platform, which is the work of the Santa Clara County Health Department, gives its users an online tool they can use to access health data at a near-granular level, broken down by city and neighborhood.
San Francisco CIO Krista Canellakis offers some tips for newcomers as well as insights into the STiR projects her jurisdiction will be working on this year.
The system fits into ongoing efforts by the county to address a recent spike in unsheltered homeless people amid California’s ongoing housing crisis.
A group of students at Stanford University has built a civic engagement platform aimed at fixing what many see as a big problem in American politics: the inability of constituents to feel meaningfully heard by their elected officials.
Designers — real modern designers who conduct human-centric research to create products and pages that work for people rather than systems — have started to arrive in local government, bringing with them philosophies that are changing cultures. A California city is in the forefront of the movement.
Lea Eriksen was named the director of technology and innovation for Long Beach last month after working in that role on an interim basis since January.
The Los Angeles County Community Development Commission — a single entity that handles housing, community development and redevelopment — has upgraded the workflow structure that allows its staff to digitize documents.
Long Beach has named Lea Eriksen as its new director of technology and innovation. She is a veteran public servant with roughly 20 years of experience working for local government, including economic development, budget, finance and, of course, technology.
Humboldt County has launched an enhanced website aimed at increasing access to its services for users with disabilities, both with and without access to assistive technology devices.
As part of its ongoing work on California’s food assistance program GetCalFresh, the civic tech group Code for America (CfA) recently conducted extensive user-centric research aimed at modifying eligibility expectations.
As Code for America prepares for its annual summit, scheduled to take place May 30-June 1 in Oakland, the group’s executive director, Jennifer Pahlka, said the event would give the entire civic tech community a chance to reflect on recent successes, as well as to set the bar for the coming year.
Code for America will partner with the office of San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón in using technology to automatically reduce marijuana convictions for city residents who are eligible under Proposition 64.
Four members of Mayor Eric Garcetti's IT leadership team discuss the growing importance of data-driven city government and the projects that make the city a tech innovator.
San Francisco collected as much as $241 million in property tax revenue in less than two weeks during December -- 11 times what was collected during the same period the previous year. So what changed? The city opened a portal that allowed users to do most, if not all, of their tax business online. In the fall the city went live with a new portal that allowed users to do most, if not all, of their tax business online.
San Leandro's chief innovation officer, Deborah Acosta, is leaving local government this month to lead a for-profit women’s entrepreneurship incubator aimed at closing the gender gap in Silicon Valley.
A Los Angeles City Council member has introduced a motion to study the feasibility of a municipal broadband network that would provide at-cost high-speed Internet to the city's businesses and residents.
San Francisco Chief Innovation Officer Jay Nath, a key architect of its groundbreaking Startup in Residence (STiR) program, has left City Hall to focus more exclusively on leading the fast-growing civic-tech sector collaboration, now in its fourth year.
News from the Bay Area: San Francisco is looking to hire tech engineers and a product manager, while Oakland's Civic Design Lab gets up and running.
When Bloomberg Philanthropies’ What Works Cities program handed out its first-ever certifications in January, Los Angeles was the only city in the country to receive gold, with eight others just behind it, earning silver.
The city of Palo Alto's CIO Jonathan Reichental has launched a video series to recruit new government technologists. Dubbed Technology and Data Careers in Government, installments in this series are one hour long.
Developers announced last week that they have expanded the breadth of GetCalFresh's availability to Sacramento County. The free nonprofit service aims to help eligible Californians apply for the state’s food stamps program. This brings to 21 the number of California's 58 counties using GetCalFresh.
The Bay Area city of San Leandro has launched an open-data page, a GIS data page and a dashboard to guide residents to services based on their background, and it's done some with help from companies from the Startup in Residence program (STiR) and an internal geographic information systems team.
To combat homelessness, the West Sacramento Police Department has begun using a tech platform called Outreach Grid, which the agency helped create by collaborating with developers. Case workers and other public servants can now map homeless encampments, consolidate client info from multiple agencies into one platform and customize intake forms based on needs.
SACRAMENTO — The Data Coalition, an advocacy group for widespread standardization and publication of government data, hosted its annual California Data Demo Day on Thursday, featuring panels of experts who work for and with the state’s legislative and executive branches of government. Everyone in attendance — from government employees to politicians to technologists to lobbyists — voiced support for open data practices, while at the same time acknowledging that California could do a bet
Startup entrepreneurs and public servants from several Northern California cities presented tech projects at the Startup in Residence Demo Day 2017 on Sept. 29, all of which were aimed at making government more efficient and better able to serve constituents.
Los Angeles city officials want to share with businesses throughout their community the effective measures that keep Los Angeles from being victimized. To this end, they’ve launched the Los Angeles Cyber Lab, a city-based resource to dole out the info and intelligence on which the local government relies each day to prevent intrusions into its own network. The lab, which is the first of its kind in the nation, is a public-private partnership between Los Angeles and Cisco.
San Leandro residents are being asked to help test some new tech to create an easier, more accessible municipal website that offers visitors a personalized experience based on their needs and tastes.
California DMV Now kiosks, which are self-service terminals with touchscreens that motorists can use to complete license registration and renewal processes, are now available in about a dozen grocery stores in the Los Angeles area, from Palmdale to Santa Clarita.
DataSF, San Francisco’s open-data initiative, has posted its annual update for its goals and work plan, vowing to increase efforts in data use among other more nuanced objectives.
The tech-based consolidation effort grew from a recent larger restructuring of the city’s governmental response to homelessness.