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YouTown’s API is now public

Here at YouTown, we’re all about Open Data. Obviously. It’s the whole point of our app — for agencies to open their data by publishing news, maps, events, and services for citizens to access on-the-go. YouTown has served as the intersection of open data and mobile government with great success. Now we’ve decided to open our own data. Check it out — we’ve published the API for YouTown (and the source code, too!)

Since APIs allow different applications to talk to each other seamlessly, YouTown can now act as a vehicle through which outside developers can work with agencies to offer a host of on-the-go tools for citizens. We hope this will be a jumping-off point for our data to be used in ways we never even thought of. It’s always amazing to see what happens when you allow creative people to work together with valuable sets of information.

Publishing the API is just another step we’re taking in the name of openness and collaboration. We hope you’ll let us know if your agency is able to make use of the data to create a customized platform. Together, we can continue to revolutionize mobile government. Happy innovating!

From the beginning, our mission here at YouTown has been to provide the greatest number of services to the greatest number of agencies possible. The whole point of our product is to connect citizens to their local governments, and reduce the steps an agency must take to communicate with the public. With that in mind, we’re making some changes to the app that will better accomplish these goals. Take a look!

• Open source.  As always, open data is our chief priority. YouTown isn’t a private or exclusive tool — it’s a platform intended to bring people and communities together. So we’ve opened the source code for YouTown so that programmers and system administrators can better understand or modify it. Anyone may build upon the foundation we’ve laid — which means the functionality options are endless and agencies can customize the app to suit their needs.

• Transition to a web app.  Providing support for each unique mobile device takes a tremendous amount of time and expense, especially as new versions of iPhone and Android appear every year!  We want to focus on building great products and not get bogged down in development.  So YouTown will become a mobile-optimized web app that anyone will be able to access from any mobile device. Support for the native iPhone and Android apps will end, but this means the Blackberry folks won’t feel left out!

These changes are intended to help agencies provide a fast-working, customized on-the-go platform to the greatest number of citizens. You could say we’re trying to become more accessible and open — just like the agencies we serve!

Cities, counties, towns, and boroughs . . . YouTown doesn’t stop there.  Departments within government agencies (such as emergency services, economic development, health department, etc.) have plenty of news of their own!  Departments can sign up with YouTown for an instant mobile connection to citizens, publishing updates, services, and maps to provide maximum customer service and transparency.

The Land Use Department in Will County, IL recently signed up and is keeping citizens informed about meetings, agendas, events, announcements, and more — all pulled together in the YouTown app and updated in real-time.  Derek O’Sullivan, Assistant Director at the Department, discussed the app on a local radio station last week.  He praised YouTown for providing a way for citizens to “engage” with the Department and get the latest updates on the go.

The show’s host said that people “always feel disconnected with their governments”, partly because they don’t go out of their way to find out what’s going on.  Because of this, it’s important for agencies to be “extra aggressive” in bringing information to citizens in a simple, convenient format.  Will County Land Use Department is using the app for this purpose, and O’Sullivan predicted:

As more and more people become aware of [YouTown], I think the governments will jump on it.

 

The Department was recently honored with the Public Integrity Award, presented by the American Society for Public Administration, in recognition of outstanding “openness and transparency”.  The mobile app is just one more way for the Department to continue going the extra mile to reach citizens.  “We’re publishing the same information that’s on our website and social media feeds,” said O’Sullivan, “but now it’s at people’s fingertips.”

We have our Gov2.0 grins on this week — YouTown is now live in the UK and Australia!  This is cool for a number of reasons.  Apart from the Netherlands, YouTown has not been available outside North America.  Now, hundreds more agencies can deliver news, maps, events, and services to their citizens’ mobile devices.  We’d love to see YouTown play a part in forwarding the Gov2.0 goals of agencies worldwide.  And also . . . we’ve just been waiting to see “boroughs” go mobile.

We’ve already received interest from communities like Melbourne, Australia and Elmbridge Borough in Surrey, England.  Can’t wait to watch as agencies in Australia and the UK apply mobile government to their own unique situations.  YouTown is versatile and can be used so many different ways.  Bringing new countries and cultures to the platform will benefit everyone as we share ideas and strategies for better communication between agencies and citizens.

Of course, the Australian government has been working hard to meet many of the recommendations presented back in 2010 by the Gov 2.0 Taskforce, which included “making public sector information more accessible” and “requiring agencies to engage online”.  Hmm, there’s an app for that . . . and now ANY agency can signup and go mobile in a matter of minutes — for free!

Agencies in the UK are certainly exploring new options for communicating with the public as well.  A recent article about citizen engagement in the UK, though social media was the main focus, touched on the key benefits of Gov2.0  tools in reviewing the efforts of some local agencies: “improving service delivery,” “reducing costs,” “improving the citizen experience,” and “gaining deeper insight into citizens’ most pressing needs.”  Yup, that pretty much sums up what we do here at DotGov!

Welcome, Australian and UK agencies.  We’re honored to be part of your Gov2.0 journey!  Download the app today from iTunes or the Android market, and get your city mobile.

Well, that was fun.  We started the week off with a missing app!  Yeah, YouTown fell out of the app store for a bit.  After going through a whole new review process we have the app back in the store and ready for download.  The catch?  You need to download the new app if you want your app to be updated with Retina support and future upgrades.  The goods news is that we now support Retina on the iPhone!  This means YouTown has never looked so good!  We also launched a couple key features for this version:

• in-app browser support
• improved text processing

The in-app browser support is going to allow us to do a lot of fun things with the application moving forward.  We already have plans to implement web forms and other components.  If you are interested in these or other additional features, please be sure to go Pro!

We are continuing to improve how we process your data.  We want it to look perfect when a citizen views it on their mobile device.  The challenge is that not all feeds are alike.  And several need a little cleaning up.  This update included some improvements that gives us the ability to grab text from the original source that doesn’t always get included in the RSS feed.

Current users: If you have banner ads or other links to the app in the iTunes store, please update those with this link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/youtown/id398168697

Last summer, YouTown was honored at the White House and named a “Champion Of Change”.   Today we are excited to share with you that Government Technology Magazine has named our CEO Michael Riedyk one of their “Top 25”.

“Since 2002, we’ve dedicated the March issue of Government Technology to 25 people who cut through the public sector’s infamous barriers to innovation – tight budgets, organizational inertia, politics as usual, etc. – to reshape government operations for the better. This year, we honor an eclectic group of individuals from government, academia and the private sector who share a willingness to challenge convention and find new answers to long-standing issues. Congratulations to our 2012 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers.”

On this list are popular Gov 2.0 greats like Jennifer Pahlka, Bryan Sivak and groups of awesome people like the CrisisCommons Co-Founders and the Code for America Fellows.

“This came very unexpected and it is a great recognition for the whole team behind YouTown. Our goal is to help further the cause of open government and open data.  With the White House Champion of Change Award last year and now the Government Technology Top 25 recognition, it certainly is an important validation for us that we’re on the right track and that people think we’re working on something valuable. From the feedback we get from cities and counties using YouTown, we actually see that it changes government and the way way citizens interact with them.” – Michael Riedyk

While most of the country has been enjoying beautiful weather, we have been having a blizzard of activity at DotGov.  In keeping with our monthly tradition, February has been another solid month of releases and updates.

One of the important updates we rolled out this month was the ability to reload your map feeds within the admin.  We published our update frequencies recently to help you understand how often we pull new information from your map feeds. However, there are times when you want to make a change to a Google Map for example, and would like to see those changes reflected in real-time.  So we added the “Reload” button to help you do just that.

We made several performance changes to our databases.  This should make the admin area even faster and smoother than before.

We added CSV and XML import support for maps.  We also added custom XML fields to our maps modules as well. Both open data formats allow you to simply upload a file with address information, for instance with school locations or city facilities, which is automatically converted into a map.  Don’t need GIS skills required to push your maps to YouTown!

CSV upload functionality was added to our Events module.  You can also simply link to a CSV file that is hosted online.  This will be great for organizations that utilize Trumba or Google Calendar.  Publishing a public CSV link is easy to do with many online calendar applications.

We are getting closer to launching push notifications!  We have been testing this feature and as always, are still interested in hearing your feedback.  If you have any ideas as to how you want push notification implemented, please let us know!

DotGov is proud to partner with the Keep Kids Alive Drive 25 program!

Hundreds of agencies are learning how they can make neighborhoods safer for our kids through the efforts of the Keep Kids Alive Drive 25 organization.  An now, these agencies can  add news, events, and even maps about their “KKAD25″ campaign and push them out to their citizens’ mobile devices.