Citizens for a Better Providence

"Our mission is to promote effective, efficient and transparent governance in the City of Providence that fairly serves the best interest of all of the city's residents. We will • Hold elected officials accountable • Educate the citizenry • Mobilize citizens, promote participation • Work collaboratively w/ government"

Citizens for a Better Providence

MediaBugs rethinks corrections by taking a page from programmers

"Scott Rosenberg, best known as the co-founder of Salon, has been mulling this idea for a while, and last week, he received a $335,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to build MediaBugs, the first correction-tracking system for news outlets in the San Francisco Bay Area."

MediaBugs rethinks corrections by taking a page from programmers

New York City is leading the way on open records

New York City is leading the way on open records. In Introduction 991, a local law to amend the administrative code of the city of New York, in relation to creating open data standards, section 23-302 reads

"All public records maintained by city agencies shall be made available for inspection by the public on the Internet through a single web portal that is linked to nyc.gov or any successor website maintained by or on behalf of the city of New York."

Let's congratulate Council Members Brewer, Lappin, Gonzalez, James, Liu and White,Jr.

Where can I play hoop around here?

Courts of the World (via) is a great example of grassroots data sharing. There is no need for municipal or school administrations to particpate but think how great it would be if every Parks and Recreation Director across the USA spent 20 minutes next week entering data about the courts under thier management. And do it again next year, same place, same time.

Establishing your identity authoritatively on the internet is almost impossible

Are you who you say you are? Establishing your identity authoritatively on the internet is almost impossible to do. Just because an email account, LinkedIn id, Twitter id, Facebook profile, Ning profile, AOL id, etc uses the letters A N D R E W G I L M A R T I N does not mean it is me. The only way to establish identity is to build a body of evidence online. So that when I search for you online I find a lot of information (bits) that link these online presences to your life of family, friends, work, and possessions (atoms). If you are a politician, administrator, candidate, or anyone with the need to have a public identity make sure you get online soon and build that body of evidence.

This posting is inspired by Twitter to verify accounts for politicians, agencies and other celebs. Which is an idea doomed from the start to failure.

You might also be interested in Geoffrey Bilder's trust tag on Delicious.

Waltham Forest's town map leads the way ahead

The town of Waltham Forest in the UK has a fine example of combining Google's mapping tools with its place data. You can use the map to find 31 categories of information including polling stations, parks, post offices, and road works. All information useful in an average person's day. Now compare this to South Kingstown's map which contains none of this information.

It is good that South Kingstown has an online map. This is a first step towards more citizen awareness but more needs to be done. More data is needed. More browsers need to be supported (Macintosh users can't access it with Safari). More standards and de facto standards need to be adhered too. And, above all, the "GIS Web Site Disclaimer" needs to be removed.