I’ve been excited by the idea of government as a platform for a long time.
It’s what motivated me to join my first civic hacking contest in 2008, and it has informed every decision in my professional career since then—including my decision to accept an invitation from the Mayor of the City of Philadelphia in 2012 to help implement that city’s award winning open data program.
And it’s this same belief in the transformational power of the idea of government as a platform that led me to Accela. I’m thrilled to be joining the team at Accela as a Technical Evangelist to help developers and business partners build powerful new solutions for Accela’s customers on the Accela Civic Platform.
By leveraging the entrepreneurial spirit and creativity of our partners and of civic technologists everywhere, Accela has developed a framework that can generate tremendous value for governments tasked to do more with less. Accela enables talented and creative people to partner with our customers to build powerful new solutions on top of the platforms that are used to conduct the business of government. This is the same approach that has powered the civic hacking and open government movements for almost a decade, and Accela’s commitment to this idea is truly inspiring.
Accela also recognizes the power of open data, and is committed to making available the tools needed for governments to build and leverage powerful new partnerships with outside developers. I’m thrilled to be able to bring what I have learned from years of working in the open data and civic hacking communities to this effort to enable collaboration and new ideas around open government data.
Mostly, though, I’m excited at the chance to get to work closely with developers and business partners to build new things to make government work better. I can’t think of a better place to do that than at Accela.
