By John Shewchuk, Technical Fellow and the CTO for the Microsoft Developer Platform A few weeks ago several of us from the U.S. and worldwide DPE teams holed up in Redmond for a few days of coding. Our goal was to prove that there is an easy way to take a Web App and port it over to a mobile experience, and then make it work in both connected and offline scenarios. Joining us for the hackfest was Accela, an ISV that provides solutions to help municipal, county and state governments streamline their licensing and permitting processes. Roughly seven months ago Accela launched an open data platform called civicdata.com,… Continue reading

Tags: Civic Hacking, Open Data, HTML5, #Microsoft, CDO

***Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from Alan Holt, Manager of Data Services for the IT department in the Town of Framingham, Massachusetts.*** The other day I was asked by my director to take a survey about what motivates me to do my job well here in the Town of Framingham, Massachusetts. I was supposed to pick my top 3 motivators. Of course I started to check off MONEY, then paused and spent some time reflecting on what really does motivate me. When I handed in the survey, money did not even make the cut. I was surprised to realize my top choice was “Interesting Work.” I am the sole Accela support person and implementer at our site…. Continue reading

Tags: Apps, Customer, HTML5, Developers, Accela API