I have recently written for our clients about AppsForDemocracy, an intriguing initiative that the Office of the CTO in the District of Columbia launched a month ago (see my note Web 2.0 Applications: From The People To The People). The competition was meant for developers to create mashup applications that use the district’s more than 200 data feeds. Individual programmers as well as agencies could submit proposals for a month to win small monetary prizes assigned on the basis of usefulness to citizens, potential for different government bodies, usability and originality.
The competition is now closed after receiving 47 submissions in 30 days and a list of winning applications is available here. As one could expect there are a lot of mashup with maps, but it is interesting to browse some of these as a refreshing view of what “citizen-centricity” mean. I do have my favorites, but won’t tell you :).
This is one of the early examples, like ShowUsABetterWay in the UK, where governments are reaching out to people asking them what information and services they are looking for.
Now this is the kind of active stimulation that governments need to understand the difference between aiming to citize-centric and actually becoming citizen-driven (see my earlier post for a neurological analogy).
8 responses so far ↓
1 Apps for Democracy Yeilds 4,000% ROI in 30 Days for DC.Gov | iStrategyLabs // Nov 15, 2008 at 11:56 am
[...] Post][Mashable][O’Reilly][Washington Post][Programmable Web][SocialTimes][Mashable][Mashable][Gartner][Gartner][GovTech][GovTech][EastCoastBlogging][Michael Guo][Boalt][Jessie X][Development [...]
2 New US Administration Takes First Step Toward Openess // Jan 23, 2009 at 12:12 pm
[...] in the driving seat, through initiatives such as mashup contests like ShowUsABetterWay.com and Apps for Democracy: interestingly enough the latter was launched by the Washington D.C.’s CTO, who is one of [...]
3 Obama’s CTO Candidate May Become CIO // Feb 5, 2009 at 7:57 pm
[...] Kundra, who is the current CTO of the District of Columbia (and who featured this blog with his initiative around Apps for Democracy), is said to replace Karen Evans in a role that would make him the whole-of-government CIO. [...]
4 The New US Federal CIO Sets The Bar High // Mar 6, 2009 at 7:50 am
[...] His reference models are the long standing tradition of D.C. with Capstat and the more recent Appsfordemocracy contest, so it is most likely that this will not just be a window to federal data for transparency [...]
5 Four Categories of Social Media Use in Government // Apr 17, 2009 at 2:34 am
[...] inbound sharing, i.e. obtaining information and input from the public and outside organizations (such as with Change.gov or AppsForDemocracy) [...]
6 Data.gov Goes Live: What’s Next? // May 22, 2009 at 4:12 pm
[...] most recent success stories about open data and mashups: AppsForDemocracy.org. This is something I followed with interest last year, and one of the last initiatives that Vivek Kundra, Obama’s CIO, took when he was still the DC [...]
7 The Four Facets of Web 2.0 in Government // May 30, 2009 at 2:10 pm
[...] web sites. But there are other examples, such as showusabetterway.com, appsfordemocracy.org (see previous post), or the mash-up request for information launched in Singapore a few months ago. Also the European [...]
8 Why The IT Industry Could Derail Government 2.0 // Jul 3, 2009 at 9:26 am
[...] when a government organization starts crowdsourcing the design of a web site? What happens when “we, the people” become software developers? What happens when the case for investing on enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools is not strong [...]
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