From: philipashlock

Subject: Introductions

Date: Sep 29, 2009 11:29 AM

To get a sense of who this community is, it'd be nice for each of us to 
briefly introduce ourselves and mention what we hope to accomplish with 
this effort. I'll go first.

I work at The Open Planning Project in NYC doing everything from project 
management to web design to advocating open data and open standards. My 
background is primarily information architecture and web design. I bike 
commute to work daily and see issues that should be reported to 311 
services several times a week. I haven't always had the best experience 
reporting things though, mostly just because of how long one has to be 
on the phone to report something simple. My objective with this effort 
is to create a very simple standard that will allow developers and 
different city governments to more easily work together building tools 
that can directly serve to improve cities while making it even easier 
and more engaging for everybody to contribute to that process. I also 
see some longer term potential in this effort: it can be a strong but 
simple example of how beneficial it is for cities to work together on 
technology and it can be a strong, but simple example of how meaningful 
and accessible civic participation can be.

Phil

-- 
Philip Ashlock
The Open Planning Project - http://www.openplans.org
phil@... <mailto:phil@...> | @philipashlock 
<http://twitter.com/philipashlock> | (360) 389-2741

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