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Smart cities sounds magical, but civic tech gets it done

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Louisville, Kentucky’s chief technology manager works with civic-tech innovators every day. That sounds to me like a good way to make a city smart. But that’s only the beginning.

First comes openness, and not just open data. Ed Blayney welcomes the innovators. He stands in stark contrast with the cold eyes and stiff silos some of them face when they come to offer a city helpful, usually free new technology.

It’s not easy for city administrators, says Blayney. “They have their nose down in their day-to-day work and you’re asking them to change the way they do their jobs. It’s not easy changing people’s minds.”… Read the rest “Smart cities sounds magical, but civic tech gets it done”

Opaque top-down systems vs do-it-yourself

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I make the hour-long drive down to Silicon Valley with the help of Waze even though I know the way there. I use Waze because it rouses me from daydreams in time to take an exit. It’s always alert even if I’m not — and does even more than that. It watches, it records, and it remembers where I go.

That’s fine even though, for all I know, it sends all that data about me to China. I say that that’s the price of smart. I simply like the features. For me, like most of us, the bargain is acceptable.

But it’s another thing when we jump from a smartphone’s surveillance up a level to smart cities.… Read the rest “Opaque top-down systems vs do-it-yourself”

The soul of civic tech

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What’s “civic tech” got to do with a cheap Buddha statue that managed to stop people from dumping trash on a city street? Civic tech, after all, is technology used for civic benefits that usually entails data and software.

I thought of civic tech while I listened to the Buddha story on an episode of the Criminal podcast. “He’s Still Neutral” told a series of stories about what I suppose could be called “city hacks” — which sounds to me like the soul of civic tech.

Civic tech usually comes from the ground up. Unlike top-down, enterprise-scale smart cities laid upon cities by the likes of Google, Siemens, and Cisco, most civic tech is the work of lone coders and small ad hoc groups.… Read the rest “The soul of civic tech”