Category Archives: open government

CiviGuard CMO Shawna Pandya talks about Gov 2.0 and emergency management

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How can government to citizen communications be improved during emergencies? Earlier this year at the Gov 2.0 Expo, I talked to the founders of Civiguard, a technology company that’s working on leveraging mobile tech, GIS and social media to create a platform to address the challenge.

Embedded below is an interview with Shawna Pandya, CMO of CiviGuard, Inc.. Pandya’s background includes experience in both technological innovation and public service, with work on the neuroArm robotic arm for neurosurgery, a stint as the VP of Research for an inner-city free clinic for high-risk youth and published papers on telemedicine for the developing world.

Canadian Apps for Climate Change Winners Announced

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Earlier this spring, the United States released community health information to provision healthcare apps and drive better policy.

[Photo by Senior Airman Joshua Strang, U.S. Air Force, via Wikipedia]

Now, scientists and policy makers will explore the potential for climate data services to inform citizens and government, enabling both to make better decisions for communities and businesses alike.

Can open government lead to greater awareness or action around the existential issue climate change? Posting open data online in of itself is not enough, although there’s no question that publishing scientific data where it can be publicly accessed, validated or stored is a huge step forward with respect to transparency.

Socializing open health data was necessary to build a better government platform at the National Institute of Medicine, where open data and innovation led to an innovative means to identity pills.

Is collaborative innovation in open government possible in Canada? On the one hand, Canadian open data consultant David Eaves bluntly pointed out some of the challenges extant because of culture: Collaborate? ‘Governments don’t do that’.

Collaborative innovation, however, may be another matter, as many governments, large and small, are experimenting with websites crowdsourcing citizen ideas.

Enter the Apps for Climate Action Contest, which challenged Canadian software developers to raise awareness and inspire action by using open data in Web and mobile applications. The open data itself came from the government of British Columbia, which created a catalogue of climate and greenhouse gas emission data at Data.gov.bc.ca.

So who won?

Best Web App – VELO

The app allows organizations to compare against peers internally and externally, enabling businesses to monitor and compare benchmarks for carbon emissions continually rather than annually.

Best Mobile App – MathTappers: Carbon Choices

“The MathTappers: Carbon Choices App is designed to help students examine the effects of their personal choices on climate change. As students track their choices their impact is assessed in terms of annualized kg of CO2 equivalents generated.”

Best of B.C. – Waterly

This app is designed to help people to use less water on their lawns.

People’s Choice – VanTrash

“VanTrash scrapes pickup schedules from City of Vancouver websites and combines it with GIS data from data.vancouver.ca. In turn, VanTrash exposes this scraped data in a clean RESTful API for other citizens to build and innovate on.” The idea here is that the app will help residents to remember to take their recycling, organic waste and other garbage out.

Will any of these apps make a difference in a global context? The jury is out on that count. Notably, several of the winners empower citizens with more lightweight access to information about local services or awareness of commodities usage. Canada may be one of the world leader’s in sheer volume of clean water but that doesn’t mean minimization of transport or use doesn’t make sense. I could certainly use a trash and recycling reminder here in Washington; maybe Octo Labs will work with a good developer if the data is available.

A gallery of all the climate change apps is online.

Climate Services and Open Data in the US

In the United States, using data as a climate change agent is part of the big idea behind Climate.gov, where public climate data from NOAA and NASA could spur better decisions and a more informed society.

Amidst varied hopes for open data and open government, enabling better data-driven decisions in both the private and public sector rank high. One of the existential challenges for humanity will be addressing climate change, particularly in countries where scientific resources are scant or even non-existent.

In February, the Obama administration proposed a climate service that would provide projections on climate change in much the same way that the National Ocean and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) provides weather information. Earlier this summer, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published new research, “Earth Observation for Climate Change,” and hosted a forum on leveraging climate data services to manage climate change. The video from the forum is embedded below:

http://blip.tv/play/hYpBgfCMMwI

For more perspective on the role of Climate.gov and climate services, read the full post on Radar.

Exploring Gov 2.0, open data and open government in Canada

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What’s going on with Gov 2.0 in Canada? I had the opportunity to interview David Eaves on Gov 2.0, open government and open data in Canada last week – and I took it. He shared even more perspective on the state of open government in Canada with my colleague Mac Slocum at Radar back in March. And if you’re not following his posts on government collaboration ( or the lack thereof), well, start. His talk about Gov 2.0 in Canada at the recent Gov 2.0 Summit is embedded below:

Eaves posted a wealth of links on Gov 2.0 in Canada at his blog after the talk.

For those interested in further perspective from north of the 49th parallel, flip through the presentation by Jury Konga, principal of the eGovFutures Group embedded below:

Gov 2.0 and Open Data Sustainabilityhttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=misa-bcgov2-opendatasustainsept1610final-100916191603-phpapp02&stripped_title=gov-20-and-open-data-sustainability

View more presentations from Jury Konga.

What does Gov 2.0 have to do with cloud computing?

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Last week, Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio rendered his opinion of what Gov 2.0 has to do with cloud computing. In his post, he writes that “ironically, the terms “cloud” and “open” do not even fit very well with each other,” with respect to auditability and compliance issues.

I’m not convinced. Specifically, consider open source cloud computing at NASA Nebula and the OpenStack collaboration with Rackspace and other industry players, or Eucalyptus.For more, read my former colleague Carl Brooks at SearchCloudComputing for extensive reporting in those areas. Or watch NASA CTO for IT Chris Kemp below:

Aside from the work that CloudAudit.org is doing to address cloud computing, after reading DiMaio’s post, I was a bit curious about how familiar he is with certain aspects of what the U.S. federal government is doing in this area. After all, Nebula is one of the pillars of NASA’s open government plan.

Beyond that relationship, the assertion that responsibility for cloud computing deployment investment resides in the Office for Citizen Engagement might come as a surprise to the CIO of GSA. McClure certainly is more than conversant with the technology and its implications — but I have a feeling Casey Coleman holds the purse strings and accountability for implementation. Watch the GSA’s RFP for email in the cloud for the outcome there.

To Adriel Hampton’s point on DiMaio’s post about cloud and Gov 2.0 having “nothing to do with one another,” I’d posit that that’s overly reductive. He’s right that cloud in of itself doesn’t equal Gov 2.0. It’s a tool that enables it.

Moving Recovery.gov to Amazon’s cloud, for instance, is estimated to save the federal government some $750,000 over time and gives people the means to be “citizen inspector generals.” (Whether they use them is another matter.) Like other tools borne of the Web 2.0 revolution, cloud has the potential enable more agile, lean government that enables better outcomes for citizens, particularly with respect to cost savings, assuming those compliance concerns can be met.

The latter point is why Google Apps receiving FISMA certification was significant, and why Microsoft has been steadily working towards it for its Azure platform. As many observers know, Salesforce.com has long since signed many federal customers, including the U.S. Census.

DiMaio’s cynicism regarding last week’s Summit is interesting, although it’s not something I can spend a great deal of time in addressing. Would you tell the Gov 2.0 community to stop coming together at camps, forums, hearings, seminars, expos, summits, conferences or local government convocations because an analyst told you to? That’s not a position I’m coming around to any time soon, not least as I look forward to heading to Manor, Texas next week.

In the end, cloud computing will be one more tool that enables government to deliver e-services to citizens in a way that was simply not possible before. If you measure Gov 2.0 by how technology is used to arrive at better outcomes, the cloud is part of the conversation.

[*Note Gartner’s reply in the comments regarding the resolution of the magic quadrant suit. -Ed.]

“Participation partition” the newest facet of the digital divide, warns Gruen

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Disparities in access to the Internet have been persistent since the scratchy sounds of a modem were first heard in offices, basements and schools. In recent years, the digital divide has grown to encompass smartphones usage, differentiation of broadband Internet and open data’s role in empowering the empowered.

Dr. Nicholas Gruen, CEO of Lateral Economics and the former chair of the Government 2.0 Taskforce in Australia, warned the audience at the Smart Government 2010 conference in Melbourne of a new dimension to the digital divide: a “participation partition” that favors citizens who are more active engaging in online discourse.

“The world is leaning towards favouring those who participate,” said Gruen. “They have more fun and more influence. If you participate more in your local school and local democracy, you’re going to have more say and more power. I see these things as very healthy, but there isn’t an equality of outcomes for everyone.”

As Rob O’Brien reported in Government News, Australia’s Gov 2.0 Taskforce pushed government entities to participate more online themselves, including encouraging public sector officials and workers to use with social media tools.

“We’ve now got 20 government blogs, that’s a great start. What we don’t have is people participating on blogs,” Mr Gruen said. “I’m not suggesting they should be making controversial comments, but just be a member of a group of people talking about policy issues.”

Redefining Public/Private Partnerships

Dr. Gruen was a featured speaker at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, where he explored public goods in the context of open government and digital citizenship. His talk is embedded below:

For more on what’s been happening in technology and government in Australia, see my report on Gov 2.0 Down Under: Australia and Open Government.

Apps for California Winners Feature Innnovative Mashups Of Open Government Data

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Today, California announced the winners of its Apps for California challenge. As the summer comes to an end, there will indeed be an open government app for that in California. As I reported earlier this year at Radar, the app contest was targeted at catalyzing innovative uses of a refreshed Data.CA.gov, which included over 400 major data sources, including XLS, CSV and XML formats, and over 100 million records. The winners will be honored and given prizes at an awards gala hosted by Government Technology’s Best of the Web Competition on September 17, 2010.

Who are the Winners?

So who won and why? According to the Apps for California rules, each entry was judged according to the following criteria:

  1. Providing value to California’s residents and businesses;
  2. Demonstrating Innovation;
  3. Promoting Collaboration and Government Efficiency; and
  4. Ensuring Accessibility and Usability.

WIthout further ado, here are the five winners:



California Cage Fight (info page) allows residents to compare their counties with other California counties and the state as a whole, including population growth, per capita income, unemployment, new houses and more.



California Environment Report: Cleanup Sites and Permitted Facilities (info page) provide residents with an interactive map that includes heatmaps, a mobile version with geolocation, data feeds, and detail pages for every cleanup site and permitted dacility from the CA Department of Toxic Substances Control Datasets.



California View (info page) is a simple mapping tool that displays the locations of California state parks, fishing holes and boating facilities.



ZonabilitySF (info page) provides mobile access to San Francisco zoning ordinance information. This app includes geolocation, interactive zoning maps, resources about code and a mechanism to ask a city planner questions.



DataCalifornia (info page) provides a browser for California education, health and current legislation. The mashup allows users to “submit ideas on how the government should spend taxpayer money. Notably, it also has a constant stream of updates from schools, first responders and local politics. The site features Facebook integration, and a “Fix” button  that should be familiar to SeeClickFix users.

People’s Choice Award



“Explore California” (info page) and the California Cage Fight mashups won the People’s Choice Awards. Explore California is similar to Data California, providing users with an interactive map and visualizations population, income, unemployment, new housing units, and other trends over time. Visitors can “compare and contrast the patterns of growth and decline in various categories and the relationships between them.”

What’s do Apps for California mean for Gov 2.0?

At review time, the winners seems like it might have the most potential to enable better outcomes for citizens to engage with government, given the tool. The zoning app could potentially be quite useful to builders or homeowners. And if you’re also an angler, the easy lookup of potential hotspots could be of interest, though old salts might not want the increased competition. A complete list of Apps for California finalists is available at CA.gov.

The contest was conducted by the Center for Digital Government in collaboration with the state of California, the city of Los Angeles, the county of Los Angeles, the city and county of San Francisco, Google, Microsoft and ProgrammableWeb.com. That collaboration featured some of the nation’s biggest tech companies partnering with public institutions to create mashups that of open public data that would provide more value to citizens.

Overall, the state saw over a dozen applications developed over the summer that might have taken it much longer to build internally, and at substantially great cost. Beyond stimulating that activity, however, the success or failure of the contest will likely be judged not upon the prices awarded or the number of apps built but rather whether these applications make the lives of citizens easier or provide more frictionless access to information. That’s a judgement that will only be rendered with time.

David Eaves on Gov 2.0, Open Government and Open Data in Canada

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“If you read only one blog in the Gov 2.0 space, you should read eaves.ca” – Tim O’Reilly.

My interview with David Eaves on open government and open data at today’s Gov 2.0 Summit is a reminder why my publisher would offer that ringing endorsement. We talked about the risks and rewards of open data, the state of Gov 2.0 in Canada and the progress of “We government” up across the border. Eaves also revealed that Canadians love Facebook, though perhaps not as much as hockey.

Cisco CTO on telepresence and the use of tech in natural disasters

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Last month, I interviewed Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior about technology, gov 2.0 and open government. In the excerpt below, we talked about on the use of telepresence in government – over telepresence – and the opportunities around teleworking.

I’m very much looking forward to her conversation with Tim O’Reilly at the Gov 2.0 Summit on private sector lessons that translate to the public sector next week. I’ll be posting more excerpts from our interview on Monday.

We also talked about the role of technology in natural disasters. An excerpt from that conversation is embedded below:

CrisisCommons and floods in Pakistan

What Warrior and I didn’t discuss then, with respect to the floods in Pakistan, is the CrisisCommons Marathon Weekend that begins today. It’s an international effort that spans the globe, from Canada to London to Bangkok to Sydney, leveraging the distributed efforts of concerned citizens and technology to provide aid in the massive disaster. For more information – and to help – consult the links below:

We will be working to assist our friends and partner organizations: OpenStreetMap, Sahana and Crowdmap (Ushahidi). Each individual city may also be working on tasks listed on the CrisisCommons wiki for pkfloods.

We’ll be working in a number of countries and timezones with staggered over three days. CrisisCamps in Canada and CrisisCamp Virtual will start on the evening of Friday, September 3, 2010. This is the same start time for CrisisCamp Sydney where the time will be Saturday, September 4, 2010 : 08:00 AEST. As we collaborate work across North America, we will run overnight and link to the CrisisCamp London team. The Canadian and Uk teams finish on Saturday, September 4, 2010 while the Sydney team will continue throughout Sunday, September 5, 2010.

Register for the Sydney, Australia CrisisCamp: Saturday, September 4, 2010: 08:00 AEST

Join CrisisCamp Bangkok for Saturday, September 4, 2010

Register for the Toronto, Canada CrisisCamp: Friday, September 3, 2010: 18:00 ET

Join Silicon Valley on Friday, September 3, 2010 5-10pm Pacific Time at 650 Castro, Mountain View

Register for the London, UK CrisisCamp: Saturday, September 4,2010: 10am GMT

Join us virtually:

Register to be a Virtual Crisis Camper

How Socializing Data Built A Better Government Platform

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Can social media, open government and an API lead to a better pill identification system? What about a collaborative effort between Big Pharma and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that could result in pictures of medications on labels for the first time?

As David Hale’s interview in my most recent article at Mashable showed, the power of social media, open data and innovation led to a better healthcare platform at the National Library of Medicine:

Every year, poison control centers get more than one million calls for pill identification. Each one of those calls costs nearly $50. Social software is helping biomedical researchers collaborate on better ways of identifying drugs. “Pillbox is a digital platform for communities to solve challenges related to pharmaceutical identification and reference,” says David Hale, the program manager. The National Library of Medicine’s mission is to gather, curate and distribute the world’s biomedical information, said Hale.

Pillbox is an open government initiative from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration that could transform how pharmaceuticals are labeled in the future. The interactive web application currently allows visitors to rapidly identify unknown solid medications, like tablets or capsules, based upon their shape, color and other markings. Pillbox remains a research and development project, so users should not be making clinical decisions just yet. Right now there are over 1,000 images of prescription drugs in the system, with many more to come in the next few months.

In the video below, Hale demonstrates the platform:

Hale will share more about new updates to Pillbox and how the healthcare community and developers partnering to restructure federal drug label data at the Gov 2.0 Summit next week in Washington on September 8th.

His last presentation, “Open Gov Ninja 101,” is embedded below:

Open Gov Ninja 101http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=opengovninja101-100526041642-phpapp01&stripped_title=open-gov-ninja-101

View more presentations from U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Rebooting FCC.gov: An interview with FCC managing director Steven VanRoekel

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Earlier today, my newest Radar post explained what to expect as FCC.gov is poised for an overdue overhaul featured FCC managing director Steven VanRoekel on participation and building platforms. For the full perspective on what’s next in “FCC 2.0,” check out Radar. Our video interview is embedded below.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Managing Director Steven VanRoekel will discuss their experiences turning FCC.gov into a 21st-century consumer resource at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C. (Sept. 7-8). Request an invitation.