Today is an exciting day for the civic technology community. Civic Commons is celebrating the public launch of its new Marketplace, and we are thrilled that some of our solutions have been listed alongside a broad range of compelling software projects.
I wrote up several of our commercial products (Hunchlab, Sajara, and Cicero) and open source solutions (DistrictBuilder and OpenTreeMap) and submitted to the Civic Commons Marketplace back in October, so it’s great to see the results made available to the public.
On a more personal level though, last week I finally completed a 77 page senior thesis for my undergraduate degree in “Growth and Structure of Cities” at Haverford College. Entitled Programming Politics: Building an Open Government through Free and Open Source Software, in it I make the case that an element of the Open Government movement is (and should continue to be) Free and Open Source software. If we advocate for our governments to be open to new forms of digital civic engagement, release open data, and use open standards, but then we as citizens are only able to engage officials and analyze data with closed source code…is Open Government actually all that open?
In the same thesis, I also argue that the “software caucus” of the Open Government movement cannot achieve all its goals through the work of citizen-built open-source projects alone. Indeed, the Free and Open Source software movements have a long history of valuable stewardship by “corporate citizens” too. Azavea is no stranger to contributing to open source projects, and I am proud to work at a company that blends its B Corporation social mission with a committed strategy of using and contributing back to the open source commons in its work, as well as an interest in being an active member of the local tech and non-tech communities in Philadelphia.
The Civic Commons Marketplace is not all about open source; and neither is Azavea. Both organizations, though, reflect strong commitments to building the same civic technology community: the Marketplace in facilitating coordination and communication among its members, and Azavea in being an active member that gives back every chance we can.
This year, we have contributed a lot. In addition to sponsoring and attending a number of events, like the OSGeo Code Sprint(which we will be doing again in 2012), the OpenStreetMap State of the Map conference in Denver, and the FOSS4G conference, we announced a techSoup partnership giving free Cicero credits to nonprofits. Also, a bunch of Azavea staff contributed to several local hackathons like Apps For Septa and, just last weekend, Random Hacks of Kindness Philly.
Before the year started though, we had to give up one of our own: Aaron Ogle was accepted as a 2011 Code for America fellow. He was able to pay us a visit in February though, along with the rest of the CfA Philly team, when Azavea hosted Philly Data Camp at our offices – a one day hackathon on civic data. Gems like PhillyAPI came out of that event, itself an amalgam of work done by CfA fellow Max Ogden and another open source effort out of Portland, PDX API.
Our data hacking days were just beginning though. As part of Philly Tech Week in April, in what techPresident.com’s Nick Judd labeled as more than an open data portal but a real “open government community building exercise,” we jointly launched OpenDataPhilly.org with a number of partners. The public-private regional catalog attempts to be a community-supported clearinghouse of data, APIs, and apps submitted by nonprofit groups, government, businesses (like us!), and individual coders. We even open-sourced the platform behind it, Open-Data-Catalog, which was mentioned at a conference in Berlin and picked up by a group in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
In July, we open sourced another platform dealing with a specific kind of data: trees. OpenTreeMap, which now powers PhillyTreeMap, Greenprint maps in Sacramento, CA, and the San Francisco Urban Forest Map, has made a splash in the community forestry community.
We put our coalition-building, data-gathering, and platform-building experience together in August and launched a Philly-specific implementation of DistrictBuilder (developed as open source, in collaboration with the Public Mapping Project) in a month long contest: FixPhillyDistricts.com. This project is near and dear to my heart, having served as an important case study in my Open Government thesis. With the press help of our partners WHYY, the Daily News, Technically Philly, and the Penn Project for Civic Engagement, over 400 users worked on and submitted 70 complete City Council district plans to our contest. City Council met its redistricting deadline on time (the first time in over 30 years), and didn’t produce a completely embarrassing result.
Having just finished the FixPhillyDistricts contest, the OpenDataPhilly team would launch the Open Data Race – bringing the contest model to open data for the first time. A ton of nonprofits brainstormed and proposed new datasets they would like to see opened. Several winners were announced at the end of October and now the OpenDataPhilly team is working with the City of Philadelphia to see those data sets released.
Which brings me back to the Civic Commons Marketplace release. Civic Commons is an interesting organization. It’s a new non-profit that was started this year by Code for America and OpenPlans to promote the development and use of open platforms by government agencies. The Marketplace is a catalog of software tools that solve specific problems for government. On Day 1, there are already 193 apps. We look forward to seeing this becoming a platform for matching government needs with useful software. You can find listings for some of ours at:
