Strike Back in the War for the Web: Government Portals 2.0

Just over a year ago, I wrote a post advocating local governments building their own Ning networks. I’m more convinced that ever that social portals are the future for local govs, and I’d like to see San Francisco embrace such an effort around its non-emergency 311 services center and capacity-building initiatives out of the Department [...]

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5/6 SF City Hall – Support OpenGov APIs

One of the most promising areas for open government efforts is cross-gov collaboration on standardized APIs, enabling interoperability of civic apps wherever one goes. From San Francisco to Edmonton, AB, city IT leaders and developers have been signing on to a key effort on this front – building out an Open311 API for access to [...]

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Twitter Strategy for Agencies and Causes

This strategic outline provides a roadmap to proven methods for targeted outreach on Twitter.

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Conundrum – Managing Party Invites and Informal Events

Is Evite the Myspace of party planning sites? That’s what Amy Mengel opined in response to my complaining about the service. With just about every social network trying steer users towards its own events solution, event planning still seems very wild west in the Web 2.0 world. Evite is well established, but I groan every [...]

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Let’s Do It San Francisco – Next Steps

The Let’s Do It movement is inherently grassroots and requires a massive volunteer effort. Since I publicly floated the idea on Thursday, the response has been positive, with support from the director of the SF Neighborhood Empowerment Network, line-level SF city employees, Craig Newmark, and, very importantly, Ben Berkowitz of SeeClickFix (a Web, phone and [...]

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Space is the Place – NASA on Gov 2.0 Radio

If you’re looking for a glimpse into how earthpeople and their governments are evolving, what better way then to check into NASA’s two April appearances on Gov 2.0 Radio. This month, we’ll go coast to coast with conversation with Beth Beck about NASA’s social media initiatives, and Gretchen Curtis on the space agency’s pioneering cloud [...]

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Cleaning Up All Dumping and Graffiti in SF in One Day

You may have heard the story of how on May 3, 2008, 40,000 volunteers picked up all the trash in the country of Estonia. Since then, similar “Let’s Do It” actions have been organized from Bangalore to New Dehli. In the U.S., there’s been a lot of action around technology and government, and conferences with [...]

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