Furlough 'Consistency and Fairness'
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5 Agencies with the Most Disconnected Leadership
No Bonuses for VA Benefits Execs
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AUTHOR ARCHIVES
The Payphone of the Future Is Calling
April 26, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
The May issue of The Atlantic, on newsstands now, highlights two of our favorite finalists from a competition New York City held earlier this year to reinvent the payphone for an era when landlines (and quarters) now seem obsolete. The city's 15-year contract with its current payphone vendors expires next ...
How the Rise of Telework Is Changing Our Cities
April 22, 2013 Technology has blurred the walls of the workplace in at least two dramatic ways. People who once worked inside the clear confines of a cubicle, inside an office, within an office tower in a commercial district, can now work from nearly anywhere. And because the spatial distinction has been disappearing ...
Mapping the Car Crash Near Misses That No One Ever Sees
April 19, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Every day in New York City, car crashes nearly happen. Cabs barely avoid clipping pedestrians. Cars on poorly signed roads all but careen into each other. A biker, somewhere, veers onto a sidewalk and out of the way of a speeding truck. These almost-events are even more ubiquitous than actual ...
Aggregating Cell Phone Data in Search of the 'Pulse of the Planet'
April 2, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Transportation researchers have long suspected it to be true that you’ll only spend so much time commuting. You have a travel-time budget in your head – for most of us, it’s about an hour a day – and you’ll only commute as far as you can get in that time, ...
Twelve Fresh Ideas for Transforming the Places We Live With Open Data
March 26, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
This year, the Knight News Challenge has been soliciting project proposals that would open up and leverage government data anywhere at the national, state and local levels (in the U.S. and abroad). As of last week, 886 projects are vying for a share of the $5 million in funding, all ...
Who Writes the Wikipedia Entries About Where You Live?
March 26, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Physical places in the modern world are increasingly layered with digital data, as we've previously written. To take one easy example at hand, the building where The Atlantic Cities is based – in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. – has its own Twitter feed and its own Wikipedia page ...
Mapping the Growth of OpenStreetMap
March 18, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
OpenStreetMap is a marvel of modern crowdsourcing. Since its creation in 2004, DIY cartographers – typically armed with GPS devices or satellite photography – have been slowly mapping the world's road networks and landmarks to create a free alternative to proprietary geographic data that can then support tools like trip ...
The Streetlight of the Future Will Do So Much More Than Light Your Street
March 13, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Back in 2011, the city of Chattanooga was having serious problems with gang violence in one of its more prominent downtown parks, Coolidge Park (to a point, in fact, where local police tried banning unaccompanied minors there). “They were getting ready to flood this park with these giant baseball field ...
What the Steamship and the Landline Can Tell Us About the Decline of the Private Car
March 11, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
This prediction sounds bold primarily for the fact that most of us don't think about technology – or the history of technology – in century-long increments: “We’re probably closer to the end of the automobility era than we are to its beginning,” says Maurie Cohen, an associate professor in the ...
Why Are There No Big Cities with Municipal Broadband Networks?
March 4, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
The Institute for Local Self-Reliance recently compiled this map of all the communities in the country that control their own access to the Internet. At best count, there are about 340 of them with publicly owned fiber-optic or cable networks, serving either all or parts of town. In these places, ...
