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33 pointsmshafrir13 comments

This makes me wish that American (local) governments worked in such a way that what DC did to support this infrastructure-wise could easily be applied to _every_ municipality.

I'd love to see this type of stuff for my city, state, etc., etc...

That is why we trying to use a lot of open source tools or free stuff like GAE for our projects. This way we can easily share our projects with other municipalities.

BTW: App Store code will be released tomorrow, it is Python/GAE so can be easily deployed for other cities.

This is pretty cool! I hope it gets the attention it deserves and that other towns/cities carry on the same work.

You might want to take a trip to the District and reassess that statement...the DC government is fairly delinquent.

Vivek Kundra, who was DC's CTO, and spearheaded these developments, is now the USA's CIO. With a little luck, he'll bring the same openness and user-orientation to the national government.

The city actually did something right... awesome

Indeed. I lived there for 20 years and I'm blown away. Walking into their DMV is like going to a 3rd world country. I figured it would be years before they caught up on the digital front.

This makes me happy to have just moved here. There seem to be a lot of civic-minded people taking initiative with technology.

I spent some time in Portland, which is supposed to be uber-progressive, but we didn't have as much of this sort of thing even there.

Not to rain on your parade, but DC has lots of drawbacks too compared to a city like Portland. One of the most distressing things about DC is how little crime is segregated into neighborhoods. People get killed even in hip areas like Georgetown and Adams Morgan. Truly the egalitarian dream. There were bodies found in the Georgetown canal while I lived there.

This sounds disturbingly like the complaint that "crime should not happen in places where people like ME like to go". I doubt you intended that to be a racist or classist comment, but safety shouldn't be a luxury given only to people who can afford the nice parts of town.

People getting killed ANYWHERE is distressing, surely.

Surely. But when moving from one city to another, it is distressing when it becomes something that you have to worry about.

mshafrir Thanks for mentioning our project. We have a huge inflow of visitors from HN (even more than from Gov 2.0 Expo/Summit attendees).

We are going to open source the entire code tomorrow (it is build on GAE, so it is easy to run for your own city/town).

p.s. We just got over free bandwith quota : )

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