Vivek Kundra, who was DC's CTO, and spearheaded these developments, is now the USA's CIO. With a little luck, he'll bring the same openness and user-orientation to the national government.
This makes me wish that American (local) governments worked in such a way that what DC did to support this infrastructure-wise could easily be applied to _every_ municipality.
I'd love to see this type of stuff for my city, state, etc., etc...
That is why we trying to use a lot of open source tools or free stuff like GAE for our projects. This way we can easily share our projects with other municipalities.
BTW: App Store code will be released tomorrow, it is Python/GAE so can be easily deployed for other cities.
Indeed. I lived there for 20 years and I'm blown away. Walking into their DMV is like going to a 3rd world country. I figured it would be years before they caught up on the digital front.
Not to rain on your parade, but DC has lots of drawbacks too compared to a city like Portland. One of the most distressing things about DC is how little crime is segregated into neighborhoods. People get killed even in hip areas like Georgetown and Adams Morgan. Truly the egalitarian dream. There were bodies found in the Georgetown canal while I lived there.
This sounds disturbingly like the complaint that "crime should not happen in places where people like ME like to go". I doubt you intended that to be a racist or classist comment, but safety shouldn't be a luxury given only to people who can afford the nice parts of town.
