Government Essays
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Primer on the US Ignite Event at the White House
Last week I attended the US Ignite launch event at the White House, where a number of Obama administration officials made a series of announcements about programs around broadband policy. There are many entities, technologies, and programs that fit together to form a path toward United States leadership in superfast broadband, but it takes some digging and…
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BatchGeo, Socrata, and Vacant Building Service Requests in the City of Chicago
I was knocking around on the City of Chicago’s Data Portal recently and I was impressed to see this data set: Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Service Requests. Here’s how they describe it: Data set contains all 311 calls for open and vacant buildings reported to the City of Chicago since January 1, 2010. The information…
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What are the City of Chicago Stimulus Bill Projects?
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, otherwise known as the Stimulus Bill, has the City of Chicago They get their data from this report from the US Conference of Mayors. There’s also no projects in New York City, which doesn’t make a lick of sense, although Los Angeles has a slew.
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Publish the details of underlying mortgages saved by Congress
It appears that the United States government is going to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bad mortgages in an effort to prevent the collapse of the world’s financial system. If they do, I’d like them to publish a list of all of the mortgages they purchase — the loan number, the address…
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Chicago City Clerk publishes search tool for legislation and other items going back decades
Here’s some news from our friends at the Chicago City Clerk’s Office. Here’s the complete text of their PDF press release: Unprecedented Transparency Arrives at City Hall City Clerk del Valle Posts City Council Legislation Online Dating Back to the Byrne Administration The old days of crawling around the basement of City Flall searching for…