Not only did we have Twilio for Government as our contest category last week, we also launched our government landing page and Twilio CTO Evan Cooke presented Twilio to officials at the White House as part of the first leg of Geeks on a Plane before jetting off to London. Check out this slideshow from his presentation to see what we created with Twilio to demonstrate the simple power of voice applications for government, and how Twilio is simplifying telecom.
This Week's Netbook Contest Winners
Mobile Commons provides many ways for citizens to contact their local representatives in the Senate and Congress, as well as the President of the United States.
With Mobile Commons, calls can be initiated via web interface, SMS, or simply by dialing 866-581-7519
Advocacy customers of the Mobile Commons Platform use their software to generate thousands of phone calls to congressional representatives all around the country.
Using mapping data from census.gov, Mobile Commons built an open-source legislative district lookup tool available at http://congress.mcommons.com. Combining this with other government data sources, they maintain an up-to-date address book of almost 20,000 capital and district offices for all federal and state representatives.
Report Issues with Public Property & Services Using FixMyCityDC
Have you ever wanted to report a particularly bad pothole, downed tree, or other issue that needs to be resolved by city services?
FixMyCityDC provides a tool for doing just that, and then takes it one step further by calling you back when the issues is resolved. Transparency and accountability in government services has become increasingly popular, and with FixMyCityDC taxpayers can make sure their money is put to work on the issues that impact them directly.
We had a chance to ask FixMyCityDC creator Zvi Band a couple questions, here's what he had to say:
How did you discover Twilio?
TechCrunch blog post from Nov 2008
How long did it take to build FixMyCityDC?
1 month from start to finish
What technologies did you use (languages, other APIs, etc.) to build FixMyCityDC?
Ruby on Rails. Tied in heavily to DC's 311 API
Anything else you want to tell us about building this project?
This was built as part of the Apps for Democracy Competition, and received an Honorable Mention.
If you had all the time in the world, what would you build with Twilio?
Total home automation!
Congrats to the winners
Jenny K From
MN | web hosting
Posted by: Jenny K | January 19, 2010 at 05:52 PM