Blog posts tagged with civic tech

With the news this week that the Trump Administration is trying to destroy the Institute for Museum and Library Services - for the third year in a row - library advocates across the United States snapped into action.  ALA fired up a "send an email to your representative" tool as well as an interactive table for looking up your representative's and senator's respective votes on past library funding bills.  As BookRiot says, not hyperbolically: "[d]efunding the IMLS would effectively end all federal funding of public libraries."

Are you going to build a community digital project, like a new online app or map for your city or region?  Make sure to check out the project toolkit from the US Census Bureau's "The Opportunity Project" for some great tips and resources!  The toolkit includes helpful explanations of the chief steps of planning, building, and supporting a digital product or service - and since it's provided by the Census Bureau, there are tons of links to data sources from federal, state, and local sources.

Something big is coming in 2020 - and we're not talking about the presidential election or the Olympics... it's the decennial US census!  And libraries have a critical role to play to ensure that their communities are represented in the census data, and the resulting program dollars that will flow.  Thankfully, the US Census Bureau and other organizations are working together to help everyone be counted fairly.

If you haven't visited the Data.gov website before, you'll need to wait until the federal government re-opens to check out the thousands of free public government dataset that used to be available to explore and download.  And if your library or community uses that data for an application or project - you already know that you're out of luck!  (In the meantime, you can still read our 2017 Public Library Quarterly article about open data in the library.)

As someone who has worked on community technology projects for nearly twenty years, it was always conventional wisdom that we had to reach people offline to bring them online.  In other words, we couldn't solely do outreach via the Internet when we were targeting people that were, often by definition, completely offline.  As librarians in an increasingly digital world approaching 2020, it can be frustrating to see low uptake of digital services or low participation rates in online programs, like summer reading. When studies show that Americans of all ages and economic groups go online in increasing numbers, why is the online use rate of our digital services not skyrocketing?

Ever been to a "hackathon" -- a gathering of technologists committed to working on a short-term project, usually a couple of days?  Imagine two dozen programmers, designers, and specialists locked in a room for 2 days with laptops, snacks, and caffeine, all focused on prototyping an innovative app for a good cause.  Learning, sharing, and pure geekery ensue!