Politics and Elections Blog
Trends, tools and news from the Google Politics & Elections team
New York City using Google tools to open up City government
Monday, June 29, 2009
We're in New York this week for
Personal Democracy Forum 2009
. We're excited to sponsor the conference and host twenty outstanding
Fellows
here from across the country.
During his keynote speech this morning, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced an innovative use of publicly available Google services to help serve the citizens of New York City. Using
Google Insights for Search
, City Hall will identify the top items related to city government that New Yorkers are searching for and make sure that information on those topics is up-to-date and available on
NYC.gov
.
Mayor Bloomberg opened his speech by saying that technology allows us to "make government more accessible than ever" by "making it easier for people to get information." He called this new initiative "a grassroots approach to web design" that will help the city connect to its citizens.
This is the type of innovative approach to open government that we like to encourage and help facilitate.
The city is using information about search trends that already exists to make sure they're providing information that New Yorkers are looking for.
The mayor also announced other ways New York City is using the internet. They're putting the city's 311 service on Skype, on
Twitter
, and
online
, so people can access information from 311 wherever they are. He also announced a new initiative to make city data available online, along with a competition for developers to create apps using this data.
More information is available from
NYC.gov
, and we hope other governments will see this as an example of how they can use our services to support open government.
Posted by Eric Hysen, Public Sector Team
How others are expanding All for Good
Monday, June 22, 2009
All for Good
has only been live for a few days, but developers across the country are already taking advantage of our
API
and
gadget
to deliver volunteer opportunities in new and innovative ways. Here are a few of the efforts that have launched so far:
YouTube
is launching
Video Volunteers
, a platform designed to make connections between non-profit organizations with video needs and skilled video makers who can help broadcast their causes through video. Video Volunteers will pool nonprofit, video-related volunteer postings from All for Good and then match them up with YouTubers who want to volunteer their video-creating skills to make a difference. Because many YouTubers have amassed a large online audience, their work on behalf of nonprofits can not only raise awareness about causes nonprofits are working on, but can also drive others online to take action. Here’s how it works: Starting today, nonprofits can post video assignments (with the words “Video Volunteers” in the description) on
idealist.org
,
serve.gov
or
volunteermatch.org
; these posts will be cycled through the Video Volunteers feed of the All for Good widget on
youtube.com/videovolunteers
, where Video Volunteers can pick up assignments directly from nonprofits. Select videos will be showcased on the Video Volunteers YouTube channel and in other high-traffic areas of YouTube.
MTV
created
Serve.MTV.com
, to bring service opportunities from All for Good to the MTV audience. The network is also developing two dedicated PSAs – the first of which will premiere in prime time later this week. The PSAs will go into regular rotation, driving viewers to
Serve.MTV.com
and encouraging them to make civil service a part of their lifestyle. MTV also plans to integrate this call to action in a number of its marquee on-air programs including “The Real World,” “Buried Life,” and more. Additionally, MTV will produce a series of short, viral Web videos, which feature leading artists and celebrities discussing their volunteerism efforts and calling on young people to make a positive impact in their communities.
The Huffington Post
is using All for Good to provide localized service opportunities to its readers. For example, they have developed a customized All for Good gadget that presents volunteer opportunities in the
New York City
area. The Huffington Post plans further expansion on other local pages to create a compelling, localized experience for each reader.
These are just a few of the sites that are helping spread the good, and because All for Good is an open source project, what we've seen so far is only the tip of the iceberg of what organizations and individuals will be able to create over the coming weeks and months.
You can participate right now by adding the All for Good widget to your
iGoogle
,
Blogger blog
,
TypePad blog
,
Gmail
, or
own web page
. If you're a developer interested in getting involved,
check out the API
and join the
API developers group
.
Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector Product Manager
All for Good: Bringing search, scale and openness to community service
Monday, June 22, 2009
(cross-posted with
Official Google Blog
)
While many organizations are doing great work to enable community service locally, it's not simple to search across opportunities from a variety of places to find what's right for you. We have some experience finding relevant information from among many scattered sources, and when we learned that President Obama and the First Lady were making community service
a top priority even before taking office
, we thought we could help make a difference.
With our mission in mind, a group of
"20%" engineers
, designers, and program managers from Google and other tech companies began work on
All for Good
, a new service to help you find volunteer events in your community, and share those events with your friends.
All for Good provides a single search interface for volunteer activities across many major volunteering sites and organizations like
United Way
,
VolunteerMatch
,
HandsOn Network
and
Reach Out and Read
. By building on top of the amazing efforts of existing volunteer organizations like these, we hope to amplify their efforts.
And in the spirit of open data, All for Good has a data API that anyone can use to search the same data displayed on the All for Good site. All for Good was developed entirely using
App Engine
and
Google Base
, with the full code repository hosted on
Google Code Hosting
. We'll be inviting developers to contribute to the open source application soon, so stay tuned.
Just as releasing the Maps API led to an surge of independent and creative uses of geographic information, we've built All for Good as a platform to encourage innovation in volunteerism, as much as an end product in itself. We hope software developers will use the API or code to build their own volunteering applications, some even better than the All for Good site!
And if you want to volunteer your video-creating skills to make a difference, check out
YouTube Video Volunteers
, a new platform designed to make connections between non-profits with video needs and skilled video makers who can help broadcast their causes through video.
All for Good is a new kind of collaboration between the private, public, and nonprofits sectors to build free and open technology to empower citizens. Similar to the Open Social Foundation, we helped create a new organization called Our Good Works to make sure that the API, the platform, and social innovation that they inspire are supported for the long term. The leadership includes Reid Hoffman, Chris DiBona, Arianna Huffington and Craig Newmark on the board, and the organization aims to build support volunteerism services like All for Good.
Today the First Lady is in San Francisco calling on Americans to improve our communities by rolling up our sleeves and putting our time and talent towards doing good. You can learn more at serve.gov, where we're proud to power search.
Posted by Paul Rademacher and Adam Sah, Engineering Tech Leads, Google
Public Sector Buzz - Thursday, June 18
Thursday, June 18, 2009
President Obama
announced United We Serve
yesterday, a summer community service initiative calling on Americans to give back to their communities. The initiative's web site at
Serve.gov
makes it easy to plan a service project of your own or find ones to participate in, and its search is powered by
All for Good
, an open source aggregator of volunteer activities that Google is proud to contribute to. The initiative will be formally launched next week at the
National Conference on Volunteering and Service
. We'll be there to help show All for Good. Check out coverage of All for Good on
The Huffington Post
and
TechCrunch
, and watch the President's video below:
The Brookings Institution
released
a new paper
, "Comparing Technology Innovation in the Private and Public Sectors." The paper evaluated the websites of federal and state government organizations and compared them to a group of corporate websites, finding that, on average, corporate websites do better than government sites in terms of personalization, interactivity, and multimedia features, while public sector sites have stronger privacy policies and provide better disability access.
Sunlight Labs
announced that they
plan to bid on creating the new Recovery.gov
and involve the community in the process, open-sourcing something normally reserved to a few government contractors. You can read the
Recovery.gov Request for Proposal
or and
follow the progress of Sunlight's bid
.
Senator Chris Dodd
(D-CT) asked for feedback on health care legislation on YouTube, and received
over 500 responses
with 26,000 votes on the ideas submitted, a new high level of involvement in YouTube's
Senator of the Week
program.
techPresident
looks at the reaction
to a
State Department
official's reaching out to
Twitter
about avoiding going down for maintenance during Iranian protests.
Posted by Eric Hysen, Public Sector Intern
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