We’re hosting a Slack AMA with civic technologists this Friday

Civic tech impacts all of our lives, whether we realize it or not.

Have you noticed that it’s easier to navigate phila.gov these days? Or are you eagerly awaiting free public WiFi? Or have you used the SEPTA app, or Philly 311? That’s all civic tech.

Alongside sister site Generocity, we at Technical.ly are taking to our public Slack to interview civic technologists live this Friday, Nov. 16, from 1 to 2 p.m. in support of open data month of Technical.ly’s editorial calendar and civic tech month of Generocity’s editorial calendar.

For the uninitiated: Slack is like instant messaging, but for workspaces or other communities, and in channels with specific topics. On Technically Media’s internal Slack, for instance, we have a few dozen channels ranging from #the-newsroom to #brag-tag to #failure to #family.

Also, this sound happens when you get a new message:

1 new message pic.twitter.com/H09WcuYYoJ

— Alex Novemberg (@aengelbro) October 31, 2018

It’s going down in the Technical.ly Slack #ama channel, so this is your chance to ask folks from the City of Philadelphia, Code for Philly and local civic shops some questions of your own.

We’ve done these AMAs (that’s a Reddit reference — “ask me anything”) before; read the recap of Generocity’s 2016 chat with Archna Sahay, Philadelphia’s former director of entrepreneurial investment, here. Our goal here is to shake up the typical reporting process by inviting anyone with interest in the topic to shape the conversation.

In other words, to open it. Seems fitting, given the topic.

A few specific questions we’re interesting in asking:

• What are some best practices for getting non-technologists involved in using open data, or understanding what it is? What’s worked recently, and what could work better?
• What data applications does the City of Philadelphia currently use, or what apps is it developing, to make government processes more efficient?
• Why should it be important to everyday Philadelphians that the city recently released that open data set of millions of property records?
• What other cities are using open data in interesting/productive ways?

If you don’t have a Slack account or aren’t already in the Technical.ly Slack, hit up the big orange button below.