Internet & Platforms

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking about networks.  By networks, I mean groups of people, connected to one another via the Internet, who are able to do things and solve problems together by way of their direct connections to one another. As seemingly obvious as that definition may be...

Here are slides from a talk I gave at the Living Cities Strategic Forum on Technology and Civic Change. Continue reading

We just posted this morning on the Civic Commons blog that our founding Executive Director Andrew McLaughlin is now moving on to take a totally awesome job atTumblr, and that I’ll be moving into the ED role at CC as of today. It has been great working with Andrew since Civic Commons launched in May ...

One of my favorite phenomena over the past few years — and one of the stories I like to tell most about why the internet is awesome — is something I call “Prescient Markets”.  Marketplaces (or just producers in some cases) that take a large amount of the risk out of producing & selling products… Con...

Whenever you start a project (and I’m thinking about building websites and web applications), you are balancing two somewhat opposed goals: 1) get something working right away and 2) satisfy all your hopes and dreams. The first, I think, is a good instinct.  The second is the real challenge — it’s y...

Last week at the Web 2.0 Expo, I gave a talk on The Opportunity for Civic Startups.  I was filling in for Code for America‘s Jen Pahlka, and the presentation itself is an hybrid of a version I did at the t=0 Entrepreneurship Festival at MIT a few weeks ago, a version Jen did at… Continue reading

This post has been a long time coming.  It’s the idea that keeps coming back; the slow hunch that’s been brewing and brewing for months.  For some reason, it’s taken me forever to actually write it out.  So here I finally go. Last Friday night, I had the pleasure of judging a round of the… Continue ...

As of 11am this morning, buses in Brooklyn are telling the internet where they are.  And I’m proud to say that our work is behind it. For the past several months, we’ve been working with the MTA on this one-line pilot, to demonstrate that it’s possible to achieve a workable bus tracking solution usi...

Next week, I’m heading to Santa Clara for a few days of “big data” at the O’Reilly Strata Conference.  I’m really looking forward to it, and expect to have my mind blown several times over.  I’m on the program committee for the conference, though I joined late and missed the chance to review proposa...

I’d like to make an addition to my internet wish list for 2011: a Strategic Networking Tool.  Here’s what I mean: Online networks of all kinds are very good at telling you who you’re already connected with.  Who your friends are, who your professional contacts are, etc.  This is great, but it’s all ...

Last night, I attended an event at Harvard about the Knight News Challenge, put on by Hacks/Hackers Boston and the Knight Foundation.  The room was full of people who are interested in applying for the News Challenge grant program.  I was there to talk about our Knight project, OpenBlock, specifical...

We are starting up several projects right now at OpenPlans. As a first step, we are setting up project management infrastructure for each. You would think that being a 10-year-old software and media company, we’d have rock-solid, time tested, perfectly smoothed out techniques for managing our projec...

At OpenPlans, we’re busy signing up new clients for our products & services, and we’re also spending a lot of time fundraising (from individual donors, foundations, etc.).  As such, I’ve been thinking about how we pitch our organization, and have recently spent some time over the past few days readi...

After many moons of plotting and scheming, yesterday we announced our organizational rebranding: The organization formerly known as The Open Planning Project (or TOPP) is now OpenPlans.  I am excited, and I think this is a welcome development. For years, there has been mass confusion (chaos! pandemo...

For a little side project, I’m using jPlayer, a nice jQuery-based audio player.   I wanted to skin the buttons a to suit my project, and while jPlayer does support jQuery ThemeRoller skins, I liked the basic look and feel of the standard jPlayer controls.  So, I just traced the default sprites in Il...

I get way too much spam in my inbox, even just counting things I’ve signed up for myself.  Most of it I delete, but today’s email from CoTweet stood out, and is worth mentioning. A while back I signed up for CoTweet, just to check it out — nutshell: CoTweet lets you collaboratively monitor and… Cont...

I can’t say enough about ScribeFire.  It’s a Firefox add-on that gives you an in-window blogging client.  Here are just a few reasons why it’s awesome: You’re blogging from within Firefox, and you can move among webpages while keeping your blog post editing window open.  This comes in really handy w...

If you use Melkjug as a Fluid app, like I do, then you’ll love this: (Melkjug fluid icon) Continue reading

Today, I got my first dose of Twitter smack down, as my account was suspended along with a bunch of others following yesterday’s Gov 2.0 Expo.  Ouch!  Well, at least I’m in good company. As one of the commenters on the Tech Crunch article noted, a situation like this is definitely a bit of a… Contin...

When I couldn’t sleep the other night, I started mocking up a zippy drag-n-drop front end for Trac, based on the snappy UI of tools like Things (working title is FasTrac).  Then, bam! Bitten by a weird, seems-like-a-bug w/ jQuery UI drag and drop.  It appears that droppables aren’t discoverable by d...