Tag Archives: government

Tim Berners-Lee gave a great talk at the recent Gov 2.0 Expo in which he describes the criteria for creating open and linked government data. In the beginning of his talk he describes a star-based rating system for putting data up in machine readable format, open formats, as a CSV file, etc. As with many things that Tim does, he almost completely had me until he started describing what “linked data format” is in his mind. His notion of linked data is that the values of attributes in a data table would be URLs to some web page somewhere that points to the “definitive” source of data about that thing. There are several reasons why this is incredibly short-sighted and wrong: Read more »

Rhiza will be in DC from today, March 25, through Saturday, March 28 to visit our partners in the capital and to attend Government 2.0 Camp, an “unconference about using social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies to create a more effective, efficient and collaborative U.S. government on all levels (local, state, and federal).” We’re looking forward to continuing the conversation began at last month’s Transparency Camp.

Are you attending Gov 2.0 — or just in the DC area — and interested in learning more about Rhiza„ Tweet us @rhiza, or shoot an email to .

On February 28, 2009, Rhiza Labs CTO Michael Higgins and CEO Josh Knauer presented at Transparency Camp ’09 on creating public information systems that support truly public decision-making. Josh focused on community-level transparency efforts; Mike focused on incorporating transparency into the design process. View Mike’s presentation, and notes from Josh’s, below: Read more »

Josh Knauer, CEO of Rhiza Labs, will deliver the keynote address to attending GIS professionals, scholars, nonprofit and government staff at the 2009 Pennsylvania GIS Conference on May 19. His presentation will use the Information Commons to explain how social entrepreneurship in the geospatial community can stimulate new and useful thinking about data sharing.

The conference, an outreach service of the Center for Geospatial Information Services and the Institute for State and Regional Affairs at Penn State Harrisburg, runs May 19 and 20 at the Holiday Inn Hotel and Conference Center in Grantville, PA.

Visit the Pennsylvania GIS Conference page to register and reserve a room at the conference rate.

After January’s airplane miracle on the Hudson, divers charged with retrieving the craft demonstrated a good reason for public agencies to maintain comprehensive, current public data — even if their immediate utility is not apparent:

The divers who located the engine at the bottom of the Hudson River could see only a few inches in front of their masks, but they were not, in a manner of speaking, on unfamiliar ground.
The floor of the Hudson, from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to Troy, N.Y., has been mapped in recent years by scientists who used sonar to scan every square foot of river deeper than six feet.

Mapping commonly shared assets of the natural and built environment positions communities to respond to the unexpected. Government agencies should maintain detailed geospatial data, even when their justification seems rather far fetched — you never know when a jet airliner will land in the Hudson River between Midtown and Jersey. Read more »

Obviously, Rhiza Labs makes the coolest participatory Web tools around. And, there’s a lot of creativity in the web world. We’re particularly impressed with:

• The National Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) Visions for Transforming America, an interactive map showing older neighborhoods that are ripe for revitalization, those neighborhoods’ metropolitan contexts, and slideshows illustrating paths to reinvestment. [via Rooflines]
• LiveMocha combines social networking with web-based software that helps users learn foreign languages within an online learning community.
• “The Printed Blog, a Chicago start-up, plans to reprint blog posts on regular paper, supplement with local ads and distribute it free in big cities.” [via New York Times]
• 99Problems.org, a project of the League of Young Voters Education Fund, is soliciting reader contributions to generate one blog entry per day documenting issues the Obama administration should tackle sooner than later.

Check these out to see a few more ways that social media is changing the way we plan, learn, communicate and do business — and stay tuned for future round-ups.

A letter to the New York Times details another reason why accountability is critical for good government: the retention of talented career public servants.

“…the biggest reason to pursue accountability: the morale of current and future career employees of the very agencies so poorly served by most government officials for most of the last eight years… For all the fickle revolving-door political appointments that… departments have had to endure… nothing so demeans worthy men and women as the abrogation of trust.
People of character will not choose to subject themselves to personal and professional debasement when they have no faith in the integrity of the offices we ask them to serve.”

Read more »

America has entered an era of government expenditure unheard-of since the 1960s, if not the 1930s, yet its cash reserves are lower than ever. The New York Times reports that China is losing its taste for U.S. debt, cutting off one huge supply of easy credit that fueled the massive expansion of government after September 11th. Obama warned of a trillion-plus dollar deficit accumulating from this expansion and the ongoing effort to stimulate the economy — a burden he believes the American people will be unwilling to bear “unless we take extraordinary steps to ensure that the investments are made wisely and managed well.” How will we recognize “wisely and … well”„

Read more »

In June 2008, Senators Barack Obama and John McCain collaborated on a groundbreaking bill to post the full text of all federal contracts with private agencies online for public review. Senate Bill 3077, the Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008, died in committee and was stricken from the books when the 111th Congress met earlier this week. Meanwhile, just as S.B. 3077 was wiped from memory, a cascade of government-related financial fiascos began. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson declined appointment as Secretary of Commerce amid allegations that his administration improperly awarded a contract to a California consulting firm. Read more »

Josh Knauer joins Pari Sabety, Director of the Urban Markets Initiative at Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, in writing about the need for accurate, available, accessible and detailed local neighborhood information.