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How Innovation Spreads
How (and why) do local governments innovate? It’s a question underlying everything we do at Code for America — and yet when answering it, often we rely on intuition rather than data-driven research....
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First Steps with Civic Analytics
Called “a geek squad of civic-minded number-crunchers” by the New York Times in a recent profile, the predictive analytics team led by City of New York’s Chief Analytics Officer Mike Flowers is...
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Towards a Procurement Strategy
What enables innovation? This is an oft-asked question. Some argue it’s the aggregation of divergent viewpoints, or the density of the creative class; others say it’s the proximity to academia or...
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Spotlight: Greg Hermann, City of Carlsbad
Greg Hermann’s official title at the City of Carlsbad is Senior Management Analyst, but his City business card identifies him as “head nerd.” Here’s what he does, in his words: I work in the City...
View ArticleMunicipal Code[rs]
We’re six weeks into our beta launch of the Peer Network, CfA’s membership-based community of innovators who work in local government. So far, representatives from 42 cities and counties are helping us...
View ArticleThe Future of Municipal Broadband [Watch]
Is broadband connectivity a public utility? Getting an education, finding a job, accessing high quality healthcare: increasingly, high speed internet access is a prerequisite to full participation in...
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What I Learned at the Summit
Kevin Roden serves District One on the Denton City Council. The belief that the citizens of Denton, Texas are our city’s greatest, yet most underutilized asset compelled me to run for City Council a...
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Spotlight: Bruce Haupt, City of Houston
Bruce Haupt (@brucehaupt) is the Director of Performance Improvement for the City of Houston. He also recently co-organized the city’s first hackathon for the National Day of Civic Hacking— a...
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How the Houston Hackathon Happened
This post is co-authored by Bruce Haupt, Performance Improvement Director for the City of Houston, and Jeff Reichman, Principal at January Advisors. View the original post here. This is the story of...
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If these walls could talk: The case for open housing data
With an average of 36 million Americans changing homes every year, we’re a country constantly on the move. But too often there’s more than meets the eye at an open house. Broken plumbing, faulty heat,...
View ArticleHelp Us Procure Procurement Policies
If you’re a government official with knowledge about your local gov’s procurement process or data, we want to hear from you — please take 10 minutes to fill out our Local Gov Procurement Survey. With...
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Peer Network Spotlight: Nicole Neditch
Nicole Neditch (@nneditch) is the Online Engagement Manager for the City of Oakland. Nicole has been a key player in making Oakland a leading city in the civic hacking movement. She’s driving...
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8 Power Tools for Government
We asked Code for America’s geeks about their favorite web tools for productivity. These tools are all easy to use, require no computer programing skills, and free (at least up to a certain usage). We...
View ArticlePerspectives on Procurement
This month the Peer Network has continued exploring opportunities to improve municipal IT procurement, convening a series of discussions and what we hope — with your help — will be one of the most...
View ArticleMVP (Most Valuable Public resource)
There was a time when technical resources were scarcer than human resources in government. But now, with the explosion of cloud storage, personal devices, and enterprise SaaS (software as a service)...
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Designing Smart Open Cities
There is much discussion about cities becoming smarter, but becoming smarter is only part of what we should be aiming to achieve. Cities need to change in many ways to accommodate the influx of people...
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Spotlight: Jonathan Feldman, City of Asheville
Jonathan Feldman (@_jfeldman) is the Chief Information Officer for the City of Asheville, N.C. Asheville is a small city with a big startup and open data scene that has been featured on GovTech.com...
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Notes from the field: BetaNYC’s PLUTO Hacknights
For the past month, New York’s civic hackers visited PLUTO. We are not talking about the “formerly” ninth planet, we are talking one of the most important datasets any city could provide as open data...
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Spotlight: Heather Hudson, City of Baltimore
Heather Hudson is the recently-appointed Chief Data Officer for the City of Baltimore. Though Baltimore has long been recognized as a leader in data-driven decision making, having pioneered the...
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Spotlight: Mark Leech, City of Albuquerque
Mark Leech (@LeechMT) is the Application Development Manager for the City of Albuquerque, N.M. He’s been leading the City’s open data initiative, ABQ Data. Since launching in June 2012, the city has...
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