City's OpenPublic Site Prioritizes Info Access for Citizens

In the Town of Lake Clarke Shores, Florida, citizens no longer have to wait to access valuable information about their town hall meetings, thanks to a new web site powered by OpenPublic and built by the team at Big Couch Media Group. Seeing a need for not only a site makeover but an overhaul of the tools that community members needed most, John Studdard and the Big Couch team put OpenPublic to the test, utilizing the responsive design theme and maximizing the available tools for citizen engagement, while also building new functionality for the platform. I sat down with John this week to hear more about the build.

State of Georgia Making the Move to Drupal Using OpenPublic

What a year for Drupal in government! After several major launches for Drupal at the Federal level from the U.S. House of Representatives, FCC.gov, and Energy.gov, I am very pleased to announce that the Georgia Technology Authority will be migrating from the commercial CMS Vignette to OpenPublic, the Drupal distribution our team developed and open sourced for use in the public sector.

Planning Your App: Phase2's Process for Getting Started

These days, it's hard for us to walk across a conference lobby or leave a meeting without someone saying "I have a great idea for an App for OpenPublic." A lot of people are thinking about ideas for Apps or translating an existing Feature into an App. For those of you thinking about creating an App, we want to lay out the internal process we use at Phase2 as a suggested starting point for your own App.

Speakers Announced: OpenGovDC Conference

The speaker line up is now live for the upcoming OpenGovDC conference! This conference is bringing together the individuals who use open source tools to advance open government.

Design for America: Participating by Redesigning DOL.gov

There is nothing more frustrating than going to a website that is hard to navigate or poorly designed. Users seek information and when that information is difficult to access, it causes a breakdown in communication, frustration, and a bad experience.

World Bank Opens Development Data

The World Bank Group has announced today that it will offer free access to more than 2,000 financial, business, health, economic and human development statistics that had mostly been available only to paying subscribers. The data will be immediately available through the World Bank Open API for developers and and also gets a user-friendly user-interface at: data.worldbank.org

What Does the Open Government Directive Look Like?

On the first anniversary of the President's inauguration, I wanted to share some thoughts about the historic Open Government Initiative and discuss the implementation details of last month's Open Government Directive. Since we are developers, we wanted to do more than talk and write about what open government is, we are interested in how it actually looks and works to a user on the web. So we prepared some mock-ups for this purpose and shared it around town. This mock-up demonstrates both our concept for the user interface and content of a great /open site, but also prototypes what a simple approach to open government data and communications could be through a templated installation of Drupal we would like to build if some agency wants one?

World Bank Open API Data: Now in Google Search Results

Earlier this year we blogged about the launch of a new Open API, which Phase2 built for The World Bank. The Open API allows third-party developers and organizations to freely query World Bank's largest dataset containing world economic and business indicators and create all kinds of interesting mash-ups.

Today Google announced the addition of the API data to its search results.

Tattler Starts Beta

Today we announced the start of beta for our topic-monitoring tool Tattler.

Where to Start with IT Security Compliance?

With the economy near all-time lows, job complexity on the rise, and millions of security breaches occurring each year in the U.S. alone, how can companies keep up with the growing myriad of compliance issues? According to a recent CIO article, “Most companies, depending upon their industry, have to comply with anywhere from one to six or more regulatory requirements imposed by a government or industry entity to protect consumers, patients, investors and others.” Much of this can be attributed to regulatory environment crack-downs like Sarbanes Oxley, the sub-prime Mortgage collapse, and major ponzi schemes.