Every thing every time, an artwork by Naho Matsuda, takes real-time information from citizens’ interactions within the city to tell a new story about the people and the places of Manchester. As Manchester’ s citizens interact with the city, a poem is generated, made anonymous and resonated across several locations, from a garden centre to a public library; a university square to a city laboratory.
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Platforms, Apps, Solutions
The Digital Communities Special Report, which appears twice a year in Government Technology magazine, offers in-depth coverage for local government leaders and technology professionals. The June 2017 report explores the idea that the tech that drives 311 can help government deliver an Amazon-like experience.
mySociety has published a report as a result of the Civic Tech Cities project, attempting to shed light on one of the more opaque forms of civic technology implementation, namely, the tech developed and implemented by public institutions in response to their own assessment of service-user and citizen needs. This project was designed to examine how civic tech implemented by government is currently operating, who is using it, and what impacts it is having upon service delivery.
The New York City Department of City Planning is now hosting a new tech services unit called the NYC Planning Labs, which is aimed at applying modern technology best practices to Urban Planning problems, and delivering lightweight, open, and impactful tools to support the agency. The Labs are founded on the idea that government can build digital services better/faster/cheaper in-house, and achieve better outcomes by openly sharing code and knowledge.
Open Data portals are in place, increasingly backed by solid Open Data policies. Cities have an important role to play here. This report investigates the Open Data initiatives in eight medium-sized European cities, after having analysed Open Data initiatives in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Paris, Stockholm and Vienna in a previous report. Cities covered in this report include Dublin, Florence, Gdansk, Ghent, Helsinki, Lisbon, Thessaloniki and Vilnius.
American Panorama is an historical atlas of the United States for the twenty-first century. It combines cutting-edge research with innovative interactive mapping techniques, designed to appeal to anyone with an interest in American history and more generally in cartography. The Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond has produced a series of incredible online tools that compose an historical atlas of the United States of the last century. The Chronicle of Higher Education already recognized this project in 2016 as one of nine tech innovators for 2016.
Cities today collect and store a wide range of data that may contain sensitive or identifiable information about residents. As cities embrace open data initiatives, more of this information is available to the public. While releasing data has many important benefits, sharing data comes with inherent risks to individual privacy: released data can reveal information about individuals that would otherwise not be public knowledge. A detailed guide from Harvard helps governments protect residents’ personal information in open-data initiatives.