Monthly Archives: March 2010

Attended the Gov2.0 Unconference last Saturday at the Kennedy School of  Government, for a stimulating time with many state, and municipal officials, plus lots of IT professionals.  Medfield’s David Stephenson was one of the presenters on democratizing data (main message, add metadata tags to the data as you put it on-line, so that it means something and can easily be changed if need be).

Lots of great ideas, such as SeeClicFix.com to report town problems in Medfield.  I have already set up a page for Medfield, that I set to share, so I hope others can use it as well.  Take a photo of a pothole or other problem the town should fix, and email it in – SeeClicFix will get reported to Medfield, and track the fix, and report back to you when it has been repaired for you to verify that it really has been fixed. Boston is doing same service with iPhone app, which I asked state officials to share with us, and Boston reported great savings to city on both the need to survey to find the potholes and the after repair need to verify that work was done.

Mass DOT talked about how they made their GPS data on the location of each bus and train publicly available, and within hours iPhone apps were written to tell users how far away the next bus really was.

Makes me think the Town of Medfield’s existing and proposed  budget data should be placed on-line, so that as we develop the budget that we will vote on at the annual town meeting, the citizens can see the process unfold, track changes, and make their suggestions as the decisions are made.

See Gov2.0 Unconference at http://twitter.com/gov20NE.