Our virtual rendition of the proverbial water cooler.
In the Code for America offices, we have dozens of passionate people spending their days working to make government better through technology; let’s be clear, this is hard work. But that doesn’t mean it has to be boring. In fact, everyone makes sure of that. Links to interesting articles, videos, or projects circle through the office at such speed and frequency that we had to create a separate email thread just to handle the load.
The following is a handpicked collection of the best news, successes, and distractions that represent our collective inbox and culture. This is our Fuzz. (And yeah, that’s what we named the email alias.)
Researchers at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab analyzed cellphone traffic from AT&T and IBM to construct a map visualizing the patterns in our “Connected States of America”. They found that cities play an important role in defining community boundaries. They act as connective hubs as people move to them from nearby counties and from far across the country. Basically, this map offers a far more nuanced understanding of what we already knew: Americans are more connected to each other than ever before.
Michael Bloomberg, billionaire mayor and erstwhile Presidential prospect, got accolades around CfA this month on two counts. First, Gotham’s Mayor hosted Reinvent NYC.Gov, a contest to fully re-design NYC’s Web presence. Then, we cheered on Bloomberg as he took a stand against wasteful government IT procurement and demanded a $600 million refund for a troubled software project. Of course this is all on top of our heartfelt appreciation to the Mayor for luring the talented Rachel Sterne onto Team Gov.
Have you forgotten the simple pleasure of the multiplayer tank game? BZFlag is the game where everyone is a tank and wants to hold the flag for as long as possible. It runs on Iriz, Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac OS X, and is one of the most popular games ever on Silicon Graphics machines. The nostalgia made it harder than ever to resist the temptation for impromptu office LAN parties. Warning: The game is wildly addictive and intern productivity slowed to snail’s pace for the better of a week.
Yes. We are st
ill mulling the benefits and consequences of Google’s meteoric rise. This particularly good piece in the New Republic considers two new books with two opposing propositions: (1) If only we could bring ourselves to trust Google its bright young engineers would deliver us the revolutionary services that we could never expect from our governments VS. (2) Google is so new, sly, and fluid, and the threats that it poses to society are so invisible, insidious, and monumental, that regulators may not yet have the proper analytical models to understand its true market and cultural power. Discuss.
Tim Yoon is a 2011 Summer Intern. Tim can sing, beat box, play guitar, do harmony, and swoon simultaneously. He showed us his talents last week when he shared his acoustic mash up of Rebecca Black’s “Friday”. At CfA we support creativity in and out of our Terminals. Congratulations, Tim, on earning the FUZZ award for Most Personal Flare.
We love the work CfA Fellows Karla Macedo and Chacha Sikes have done with the Noun Project to realize Iconathon – the initiative to create new civic symbols for the public domain . In August & September 2011, several cities across the US will participate in a series of day-long collaborative workshops called “Iconathons”. So go! Contribute your ideas to develop relevant symbols for objects like ‘potholes’ and ‘grafitti’ or civic ideas like ‘local’ or ‘community news’. All skill levels welcome.
Ever wonder how powerful your officials are in Washington? Designer Thomas Gibes has given us a precise and accessible answer to this question. Clear Congress Project (CCP) leverages real-time data sources and information visualization techniques to serve as a model that realizes transparency as a process beyond data access and offers a new format for news distribution. Search your congressman and find out how/if they can throw their weight around the beltway.
The Khan Academy is a non-profit with a big goal: Change education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere. They are building a new iPad app to help. We found the screenshots here.
The project is open source and can be found here.
We believe in the power of Open Data. But, we also think spreadsheets are boring. Infographics are a tool to bridge the gap. Infographics can turn data into compelling stories which can help the most tech averse among us quickly grasp complex relationships and ideas. Visual.ly collects some of the best examples on the web. Add to your feed and enjoy!
Backbone is a lightweight model/view/controller framework for writing complex JavaScript client applications in a simple way. Unlike other client-side frameworks, you can read through the code in about an hour. You can use your existing knowledge of HTML and CSS, and your favorite templating language.
