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Ghana Business News » Partnership to turn 4,000 women in Ghana, others into mobile money entrepreneurs

USAID Development Data Jam in Washington DC, December 2012 had several speakers referring to mobile technology as the common denominator connecting people to the data economy. This is a well written article applying the idea of citizen/government collaboration toward a positive economic outcome. Maura O’Neill, Chief Innovation Officer at USAID and a speaker at the Data Jam is also quoted in this article. Ghana Business News » Partnership to turn 4,000 women in Ghana, others into mobile money entrepreneurs

Open Governance done right: creating rules without ruling | open-strategies

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  Original Article From http://open-strategies.de/sessions/open-governance-done-right-creating-rules-without-ruling My Opinion on Governance Governance both from a data curation perspective and a processual, cultural perspective are vital in any open government initiative Most of the time little thought seems to be given to governance. This lack of governance leads to policy problems, data quality problems and the effectiveness of applying open data and open governance initiatives toward true data driven policy making. Posted on Scoop.it Via Ivan Begtin at http://www.scoop.it/t/opengovdaily My Opinion on Scoop.it's Scoop by Ivan Begtin Jason Hare 's insight: Very timely article. I am writing the City of Raleigh's "Open Raleigh Vision". I  hope I can anticipate the need for the types of collaboration I will need on data classification, open data policy, open data brand marketing and service oriented architecture to link it all together. This is all new territory. 

DEC 21 The Trouble with Geoportals

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  For my Open Data Program I plan on using a mix of Mondara and ArcGIS Online as my mapping tools. We won't kill Geoportal but link to it and make it accessible to those folks that actually use that data. Chris Herwig from Mapbox.com said it and we all think it: Open data is not truly “open” if it is inaccessible. As the open data space matures, domestically and internationally, we need to start talking about best practices for making open data more open and accessible. I’m going to go over a few of the key takeaways from my recent work, highlighting some successes and failures in providing geodata at the state and local levels in the United States. Read more of Chris Herwig's comments at this link below: http://mapbox.com/blog/trouble-with-geoportals/

Cities as Vast Data Factories

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Someone from the City of Raleigh sent this in concerning the city's use of #opendata .There is a healthy discussion going on in one of the Linkedin groups Open Development Technology Alliance. + chad foley I thought you and+ Bonner Gaylord might find this interesting being that someone emailed Chad about it this evening. Special report from The Economist focusing on smart cities and how technology turns urban areas into "vast data factories" » IN 1995 GEORGE GILDER, an American writer, declared that “cities are leftover baggage from the industrial era.” Electronic communications would become so easy...

Open Government at the Local Level: Durham Public Schools Bond Referendum

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  Long Range Facilities Plan Website One of the last projects I was tasked with as a web analyst at Durham Public Schools was what I think of as "open government". In 2012, Durham Public Schools wanted the public to approve a 9 million dollar IT initiative to upgrade the student computer labs in select DPS schools to reach parity with newer labs in some of the recent construction. The DPS Board of Education and most of the executive leadership team was in a debate about how to approach Durham County to ask for this re-appropriation. One of the ideas was to showcase the nicer labs to show how efficiently the district was spending money within the IT department. My colleague, Charlotte Claypoole, and I thought we should do the opposite. Charlotte and I wanted to show exactly what the problems were within the older schools. Some of these buildings were quite old and the wiring and infrastructure were not capable of handling the computing needs of the students. I built the websit

USAID DataJam Notes from the Field

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  Todd Park at USAID DataJam December 10th, 2012 I was honored to participate in the Global Development Data Jam at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House. The group in attendance represented several NGOs, private sector organizations and federal agencies associated with USAID. The theme of this Data Jam was open data being used to enhance effectiveness in program spending and to create transparency in foreign spending by USAID. USAID DataJam Themes included: The future of the data economy driven by open data and big data Open data as infrastructure The correlation between lack of data access and poverty Open data as the next big economic multiplier Crowdsourcing data cleansing activities Open data is not usable data Social media for situational awareness and crisis management ( http://corp.geofeedia.com/ ). Speaker Notes Todd Park: U.S. Chief Technology Officer, The White House What is the next big thing? GPS was released in the early nineties which led to billion

What does Open Government Mean to You?

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  Open Government Open Data to Open Government Open Government is not new. The Magna Carta was created in England in 1215 as a Charter to check the power of the monarchy. That the French translation less than 5 years later from Latin to vernacular speech might arguably be hailed as one of the first acts of "open government" in Western Civilization. One may argue that this desire for plurality and dialog that was codified into English law and tradition is actually of Anglo Saxon origin and therefore the descendant of an earlier tradition. One might also tongue-in-cheek say that the Magna Carta was not in machine readable format therefore not "open data". These terms underscore my point. "open data" is not "open government" any more then a street is public transportation. One makes the other possible but it is only a necessary and not sufficient condition. Open Government when it works is the shift in the paradigm of how government interacts with i