Introducing The Techlaration

Many of you know that I, humble Declaration co-editor, am also something of an information technology hobbyist, and I’ve had occasion to use my tinkering to enhance my reporting on Philadelphia and elsewhere.

I’ve also often found myself with material I think people would be interested in, but that doesn’t really fit an article format.

The Techlaration will explore in greater depth and with experimental media technology-related coverage already on the Declaration’s beat, we don’t seek to be a foil to but rather to complement existing hyper-locals like Technical.ly and Geekadelphia.

I do think I’ll write about different things than they will, we should get along all journalism-ecosystem-like. Did you know we have one of four DHS Federal Protective Service “Megacenters” here in Philly?

Among projects here, you’ll find research into and visualization of public safety data, documentation of the surveillance infrastructure and what Philly spends on it, and features covering innovators and newsmakers from the local information technology community, and its margins. I’ll also post here annotations where appropriate regarding our growing library of FOIA and public interest documents.

It’s also a place where I can post more casually and often about technology angles that are only mentioned in feature coverage. Here I can explore documents and records and other data in a format designed to allow our readers to follow the investigative and analytic process. I’ll post cool infographics and links to useful sites, there may even be GIFs. Here you’ll find posts about mapping and GIS,  something I call Research Hacking, tech gossip and aggregation, and anything else I think fits in the column. If you have an idea for a story, I want to hear that too. Email me at phillydeclaration OR kenneth.lipp @ GMAIL with “Techlaration” in the subject line with story ideas and cease-and-desist correspondence or whatever.