How Many Trees Does Government Cost?

For the past fifteen years I’ve been working with governments to help them adopt paperless workflows, particularly in the legislative process. Paperless strategies can be contagious. If you start at the core of your business, there’s no debate about whether or not to do it for the rest. In fact, people generally start looking for more ways to go paperless because it makes the job so much easier; not just by way of the absence of paper shuffling, but in the vastly greater functionality and speed of digitized data. So, let’s start at the core of local government - the meetings - and look at what it really costs.

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Code for America Salon: Build Collaborative Open Government

If you haven't heard of Code for America, it's like a peace corps for geeks. Designers, developers, product managers and technologists serve a fellowship for a year and help 'reboot government' by building new and innovative open source/platform solutions for city governments. This year, they have teams of three to four fellows in eight cities, including several Granicus clients: Chicago, Honulu, Austin, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. The CFA Salons are monthly gatherings of thought leaders in the Gov 2.0 space who share interesting insights into their work.

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IIMC in Portland: 5 Tips for Eco-Friendly Fun! #IIMC2012

According to Popular Science Magazine, Portland is known as America’s #1 Greenest City. However, Portland did not receive this title just for their trees; the City of Portland and their citizens have made it a priority to put the environment first. While you are at IIMC this year, you can easily take advantage of Portland’s finest eco-friendly activities and experience what the #1 Greenest City really has to offer.

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Municipal Clerks Go Green with Granicus, Plant a Billion Trees

The annual International Institute of Municipal Clerks (IIMC) conference has positively affected thousands of communities all over the world by creating more efficient and open governments. This year, clerks will be convening in Portand, OR for the annual IIMC Conference where they will team up with Granicus to become greener governments, and help plant a billion trees!

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Highlights from TransparencyCamp 2012

This past weekend, Granicus attended the annual Sunlight Foundation Transparency Camp. It's a two day 'unconference' where attendees propose sessions throughout the weekend on topics covering the government transparency movement.

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CAPIO: The Top Ways to Increase Public Engagement & Influence

This year’s California Public Information Officers conference shined a light on how important online public engagement has become. About 100 people convened in Palm Springs for 3 days to share ideas and learn new ways to keep their community engaged and informed. Granicus was lucky to be able to connect with so many amazing and inspiring PIO’s! I wanted to share a few of the top tips we gathered.

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A New Age of Participatory Planning

Over the past week, I spent a lot of time at the American Planning Association national conference, speaking with planners from across the country. These are the public’s future thinkers of today, convening to figure out the best of the best practices for improving areas, urban to rural. Clearly, one trend at the conference and of great interest to all whom I spoke with is the use of citizensourcing in participatory planning.

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