Harvard fellow Gene Koo wrote a thought-provoking post last week about how games can be used to bolster civic engagement and democratic participation. He noted two general ways they can be used towards these ends: games for crowdsourcing and games to determine what things people value and how they value them (value discernment). Games for Read more…

At TOPP we talk a lot about technology promoting open government and civic engagement, but projects may fail to bring about real change if they don’t actively engage government as well.  Take Stimulus Watch, a great project which furthers these two goals, but—as Ian points out in his recent post— assumes that politicians will take Read more…

As much as I am loathe to paraphrase that clichéd Ben Parker quote, I had a nightmare a few nights ago that made me worry about the good work we do here at TOPP Labs. There was nothing specific about it that worried me, but I did have a general sense of foreboding and unease about the tasks that we’re taking on and the responsibilities they entail.

Recently Phil Ashlock and I headed down to DC to participate in TransparencyCamp, a BarCamp event put on by the Sunlight Foundation.  We spent two days with ~200 open government and transparency advocates from all sectors — government, non-profit, tech, etc.  All in all, it was a pretty amazing event — great people and good Read more…

I was at a get-together recently where people were asking “how do we sell government on transparency?” The general context was: we don’t like quantity or quality of data the city government is giving us. The idea people offered were things like it’s our data, we paid for it, and it is important for people Read more…

Wow! We are honored. Treehugger blogs dozens of green-goings-on throughout the U.S. and the world everyday (so many some say it is hard to read them all!) We get regularly featured with some of our posts and films and we are very thankful. But even more exciting is the fact that Streetfilms, Streetsblog and the Read more…

Livable Streets are a GOOD (as in, the magazine) thing: Streets can and must be more than just a place for the movement and storage of private motor vehicles. The urban street of the 21st century will be a “complete street,” accommodating pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders alike. At the Livable Streets Initiative we are Read more…

There are a number of sites now that invite “participation” by proposing or collecting ideas and having the “public” vote on those ideas. The supposition here is that there is a politician somewhere just desperate to base decisions not on their own belief and intuition, not even on general surveys of public opinion, but to Read more…

I spent last weekend and the beginning of this week at my first ever PyCon. And while the whole experience was good, there was one part that stood head and shoulders above the rest: The open government code sprint hosted by Sunlight Labs, a two-day intensive coding session aimed at opening up government data. But Read more…