In preparation for National Day of Civic Hacking, we wanted to show off a tool that helps liberate table data from PDFs called Tabula. Tabula is an open source tool built by Manuel Aristarán with the help of ProPublica, La Nación DATA and Knight-Mozilla OpenNews. We sat down with Aristarán to talk about the app and give a short demo. Continue reading
Year: 2014
LoveLand helps map out Detroit’s vacant properties
On May 20th, Detroit civic startup Loveland Technologies presented at OpenGov Hack Night. Loveland is a company that helps governments, nonprofits, and community organizers to gather and present public information about properties. Through their work, they’ve been able to map out every single vacant property in the City of Detroit.
City of Chicago launches status blog for data.cityofchicago.org
Last week, the City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology launched a their Tumblr Status Blog to let users of the city data portal know about downtime and technical changes made to the the data portal.
The team at DoIT will be writing about their efforts to migrate geographic datasets from attachments to browse-able maps, changing the API call name to correct a spelling error or improve consistency and provide updates if the portal is having a technical issue or working on fixing an out-of-date dataset.
You can check out the status blog at chicagoportalstatus.tumblr.com
CivicArtworks Helps City Planners Get Community Feedback Through Software
On May 13th, civic startup CivicArtworks presented at OpenGov Hack Night. CivicArtworks is a tool to help city planners get feedback from residents during the planning phase of major projects.
Zach Borders of CivicArtworks at OpenGovHack Night
Video Interview with Joe Olson of Foodborne Chicago
Foodborne Chicago is a website that connects people who complain about food poisoning on Twitter to the people who can help them out— the Chicago Department of Public Health. This Smart Chicago Collaborative Project recently had it’s one year anniversary and has responded to over 300 food illness tweets and has initiated over 60 different restaurant inspections in the City of Chicago.
An early schematic of Foodborne Chicago
To learn more about how the site works, we sat down with Joe Olson to talk about how they’re using machine learning and APIs to help the health department combat foodborne illness.
Hack Night Live: Loveland
Jerry Paffendorf from Loveland will be talking about the amazing work his outfit has been doing in Detroit, from opening up the Motor City’s property data through Why Don’t We Own This, to fighting blight by helping residents buy vacant properties from local governments, to surveying every single property in the city through their Blexting app.
We’ll begin our live coverage at 6:15 right on this blog post!
