GovAlerts is a service that allows you to get an email if your local body is scheduled to discuss an issue of your interest based on keywords you specify. This can help you participate in discussions on issues that matter to you. As of Aug 2014, they were covering only a small number of Municipal bodies, but I can see the service expanding rapidly with time. Interestingly, the service allows people to create three keywords for free and charges a very modest fee of 99 cents per month for additional keywords for power users. Financing such initiatives is a major concern for most innovators in the […]
municipalities
eGovernments Foundation: “eGovernments Foundation is a not-for-profit trust founded in 2003 by Nandan Nilekani and Srikanth Nadhamuni with a goal of creating an eGovernance system to improve the functioning of City Municipalities leading to efficient delivery of services to its stakeholders…eGov products have been successfully deployed in more than 275 Municipalities across the country. These include state wide implementations in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh as well as large corporations like Corporation of Chennai, Municipal Corporation of Delhi, Bangalore Mahanagar Palike, Nagpur Municipal Corporation and Kanpur Nagar Nigam”
OMG Standard – The Open Municipal Geodata Standard Organization: OMG is a collaborative for promoting more openness in Municipal data. It seeks to develop technical standards for sharing information across municipalities, develop case studies on public geocoded data and other things that are of interest to the open data community.
Lessons from Michigan: David Eaves writes about the government of Michigan initiative to create an innovation fund to create software useful to the government through collaborative projects that involve public, private and not-for profit organizations. He laments at the same time that the executive order does not require the software to be made open source, even though the government is paying for the creation of the software. Incidentally, I had a conversation with a former Principal Secretary for Municipalities in the undivided Andhra Pradesh (this was in early 2014). He mentioned that they had given a contract to a firm to develop a software for monitoring the collection […]