Code for America

What is very exciting about U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) ‘Commerce Business Apps Challenge’ is that this is another Commerce contribution to the President’s Open Innovation agenda. We’ve been releasing data on Data.gov for years, but now we are using that data in a way that businesses can more easily consume so they can grow and create jobs. As Vint Cerf of Google said, ‘Unlocking US Government data will not only stimulate new uses for it but also draw attention to this vital trove of information that has likely lain fallow for lack of visibility and digital accessibility.’

…a changing mind-set. The number of college freshmen who believe that it is “essential or very important to help people in need” soared to its highest level, 70%, since 1970. But here’s the most interesting statistic: Although more than 25% said they had demonstrated for a cause, less than 10% had worked on a political campaign. Indeed, a Pew survey found that 18- to 29-year-olds are paying less attention to the current election than any other demographic group.

Lemonopoly, an online game that emerged from San Francisco’s Creative Currency hackathon, aims to ensure that no lemon goes unused—and that the Bay Area’s lemon supply continues to grow. Designed by Code for America fellow Chacha Sikes and software programmer Anselm Hook over the course of a weekend, the game pits different cities in the Bay Area—San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley—in a quest to rack up the most points. Whichever city has the most points at the end of the game (it will run for two months starting this summer) wins bragging rights.

Health 2.0 Developer Challenge, launched on June 2nd, 2010 at the Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI) meeting at the IOM, with support from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), hoped to ignite innovation using newly opened government datasets.

The goal now is to continue the excitement of CHDI and to bring the Health 2.0 Community together for rapid application development. There’ll also be more government data and privately contributed health data for developers and teams to work with.

We saw an opportunity to take an experiment done in Philadelphia and apply it in Denver ahead of our summer hackathon to generate a test case for simple engagement methods and generate a large amount of data. In partnership with OpenPlans, we are proud to announce Denver’s Beautiful Streets.

Create platforms where citizen citizens can actively serve. Code for America plugs software developers into city halls for a year so they can help government work better and spark decentralized citizen problem-solving. It’s a great program — and a template for other kinds of talent-tapping for the common good. How about Write for America, or Design, or Build?

I’ve committed to BillTrack50 as my way to try to make a difference. I have a deeply held belief that the world is full of smart people with great ideas (and also funny people, but that’s a different post). The better we can inform smart people about what the state legislatures are doing, and hook their great ideas into the process, the better off we all will be.

To me, getting people more involved in the political process, beyond simply voting every four years, is work that matters.