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A Lesson from My Time at the White House:
Why Bringing Code for America To Long Beach Could Make Our Local Government More Transparent
By Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske
September 11, 2013 --
In late July of this year, I was honored at the White House
as one of six national Champions of Change for Open Government. This honor is
bestowed on individuals who have advocated in their communities for open and
transparent government – something which I have done since elected to City
Council in 2006. The White House acknowledged my being the first on the Council
to post my appointments and meetings and my frequent outreach on city issues
via my blog, Facebook and email alerts. Most significantly has been my work on “Open
Up Long Beach” – to provide city documents and behind the scenes tours so that
residents can learn first hand how the City of Long Beach operates.
The second part of my day at the White House was meeting and
talking with “civic hackers” – those who participate in taking public data and
turning it into usable applications that help citizens learn more about their government
and increase their opportunities to access it more readily. The leaders of this
movement come from a non-profit organization: Code for America whose mission is
to connect citizens with their government by using open data to create
applications.
Code for America and their “brigades” of hackers have
already created a number of applications with open source code that are
available for free to the City of Long Beach:
https://textizen.com/ --
which provides a way by which citizens can engage in a dialogue about city
issues by mobile phone. The city sends out surveys and asks citizens to
respond.
http://answers.honolulu.gov/
-- Honolulu Answers can be converted into Long Beach Answers and allows
residents to go on line and type in questions and get answers specifically
about such things as how to get a dog licensed in Long Beach, where to pay a
parking ticket, how to get a sidewalk fixed, etc.
http://opencounter.cityofsantacruz.com/
-- this smart program was developed for the City of Santa Clara but can be used
in Long Beach. It walks you through step by step on how to open a business in
the City.
http://chicagocouncilmatic.org/about
-- this tracks the votes of councilmembers by linking with Legistar (which Long
Beach uses) and then puts not only votes but campaign contributions and other
information on a website for each member of the city council so that citizens
can get the information they need without having to search several websites.
I was very fortunate to meet and talk with Christopher
Whitaker, who is the Brigade Captain for the City of Chicago. Christopher
teaches a weekly class on civic hacking at Chicago's Open Gov Hack Nights. When
not at Hack Night or reporting on the state of civic hacking in Chicago,
Christopher works at Smart Chicago Collaborative on projects like the Chicago
User Testing Group, which ensures that the apps being developed by civic
hackers are useful to the everyday Chicagoan. People like Christopher are right here in Long
Beach and are ready to step up and use their skills to develop programs for
free that residents can use and that will enhance engagement with City Hall.
The City Manager has applied to bring three Code for America
fellows (at a cost of $180,000) for a year. It wasn’t quite clear from the
Council agenda what these hackers will be used for. Without spending a dime, we
could start right now and use some of the programs already developed for other
cities and move forward on making Long Beach more open and transparent.
