With civic engagement becoming an increasingly critical component of successful governance in the 21st century, cities around the world are seeking to leverage technology as a tool for citizen participation, but civic leaders face real challenges finding, evaluating, and deploying …
Lauren DysonCommunity Coordinator
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Lauren
Wired for Change: an equitable digital future?
The Ford Foundation has posted videos of sessions from last month’s Wired for Change conference, featuring social innovators, technologists, entrepreneurs and philanthropists like Bill Clinton, Tim Berners-Lee, and Arianna Huffington working to answer a question close to Code for America’s …
Knight & Pew Report: Openness in city hall benefits quality of life
Residents who believe their local government shares important information openly are more likely to be satisfied with the overall quality of their community and civic life, says a new report entitled How the Public Perceives Community Information Systems from the …
The Kids Are Alright: Net Leads to Engagement, not “Slacktivism”
Just a few weeks ago, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released a study showing that social media users were more likely to participate in groups online and offline, contrary to popular assumptions that digital media is detrimental to …
Code is Law, Law is Code: Law.Gov & The Local Challenge for Legal Transparency
In his 1999 book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig wrote, “Code is law.” The underlying software and hardware of the internet regulate the architecture and infrastructure of cyberspace. Lessig wrote about how “open code,” or open-source software, …
How will Gov 2.0 address the digital divide?
Last week, I wrote about how the internet facilitates civic participation and encourages individuals to connect with each other. But what about those on the other side of the digital divide? Not everyone has access to the technologies that enable this …
The Internet and Civic Participation: What the Pew study tells us
The Pew Research Center’s Internet and America Life Project recently released a new national study on the impact of the internet on participation in group and organizational life. The results revealed that individuals who use the internet are more likely …
Gov 3.0?
Jen Pahlka, CfA’s founder and executive director, was featured in a recent article about Web 3.0 and local governments on Government Technology. The article asks what the advent of Web 3.0 — understood as the growing prevalence of “machine to …
