Hack for Change Louisville is being held as the city’s formal National Day of Civic Hacking event. The day will bring together local government leaders and staff, local organizations, businesses, visitors, and community members and is focused on civic innovation.

Success!

The event was a huge success!  Thanks for everyone who participated including Greg Fischer, Louisville Metro’s Mayor.

We had 30 people sign up and over 40 attend.  Louisville Innovation Director Ted Smith was out of town but helped with social media stories.  We were part of 95 cities and 10,000+ participants across the nation.

After brainstorming 9 ideas, we voted and decided to focus on 5 for the day.  People self-organized into 5 groups based on interest, and some people jumped between multiple groups.  I made the rounds to each group helping out as I could with API advice, Google Maps coding, Open Street Map editing discussions, suggestions for features, data wrangling, and helping discover the best tools for a job.

The teams decided to continue working through our copious lunch, and by 3:30 it was pitch time.  Teams presented what they had completed, hurdles they had, and what the next steps were.  I followed along and documented each project’s progress in our application gallery.

Roadblocks included:

• Council District Spending - Project stalled when team discovered official expenditure data was redundant, obtuse, and not as granular as the non-exportable LouieStat data.  Tried to source data from Courier-Journal, but it was 2 years out of date and not exportable anyway.  Team is drafting a letter of recommendations for open data team and revenue department.
• Parks and Rec - The team was going to use the Park Locations and Amenities open data set, but found it lacking. Every amenity listed in a park is geolocated to the same point. So there is no way of knowing where the amenity is in the park. Also, paths and roads are not up to data in online mapping systems (Google, Open Street Map). The team will have to do this manually, which is time consuming and prone to error since they are not the data experts. The team recommends that Metro Parks updates its data set to place the amenities accurately with latitude and longitude, and use Google and Open Street Map editors to improve park details for everyone.
• BriGenie - Bridges Project site does not have public feedback, daily/weekly/monthly updates and progress breakdown by category.  So the problem is lack of detailed data. Without the details being released by the project weekly in a machine readable format, the only alternative is citizen journalism approach which is cumbersome, a large time commitment, and prone to delays.

Success Included:

• BehRest – Great use of open crime, restaurant data from the city, and the team will continue to work on the app.
• Parks and Rec – Team will be manually locating all park amenities and editing them into Open Street Map to use through OSM routing API. They will continue to work on the project.
• Lost Pet Finder – Team had a working version, and is going to continue with the app and widget.  They will need help from Metro Animal Services to understand some of the raw data.

The other projects will continue if can they overcome their open data hurdles.

Interesting Links

- People wanted the mayor to create a Louisville open data law/policy that made all public data open by default, rather than selectively.  Vote for that idea here.  A few other US cities and states have started doing this.

- Individuals looked at editing details in their neighborhood in the new Open Street Map iD editor.

- It would be nice to have an open data GIS portal at Lojic (like Lexington has) so people could add parcel outlines, property values, building outlines, utilites, etc to Open Street Map.

Gallery

We’ve got the 5 projects up in a Challenge Post gallery!  Take a look and comment and vote on them until this Thursday.

> VIEW GALLERY <

Hack for Change

Here’s what to expect:

• Software development (a hackathon event) using the city’s open data.
• Collaborative building of open data apps and services.
• Discussions on open data the city, county, and state should release.

The initiative is a united effort to connect citizens and government in a partnership focused on improving people’s daily lives through technology. This event will bring together techies, entrepreneurs, do-gooders, activists and others like you from across the nation to collaboratively create, build, and invent tools using publicly-released data.

Together across America, these events will provide citizens with an opportunity to do what is most quintessentially American: roll up our sleeves, get involved and work together to improve our neighborhoods, our lives and our government.

Civic hacking as a form of citizen engagement and volunteerism is gaining momentum reaching cities across America not those known for technology and innovation. Civic hackers are already active and contributing to the betterment of your community.

Originally the event was going to be competitive, like Code for America’s recent Hack-a-thon.  But the spirit of this event is collaboration, cooperation, and learning.  So there will be no prizes, just awesome ideas and apps that we create during and after the event!

The Story

The White House’s Code for America fellows came to Louisville and hosted a Hack-a-Thon in February.  The YourMapper team won first place for its public safety app SafetyCheck which uses crime reports from the city’s open data portal.

Now Michael Schnuerle from that team is organizing the Louisville chapter of the National Day of Civic Hacking event, as a way to get more local developers involved in local civic volunteerism.

This event will be community building, and raise awareness for what can be done by developers to help citizens solve problems using open data.

Lexington, KY is also hosting an event, using Lexington’s open data portal, making the effort a state-wide collaboration.

Get $100 in free Amazon AWS Cloud services!

Sign up now and participate to get your credit the day of the event.

Examples

Here are some examples of apps built of public open data.

• SafetyCheck – Immediate crime score at your location, with alerts.
• YourMapper – Browse public data around your location.
• Bus Stop DC – Real time DC, Maryland, and Northern Virginia bus predictions.
• Don’t Eat At – Alert when you check into a restaurant risking closure for health violations.

Goals

Hack for Change Louisville has these main goals:

• Create a one-day environment for entrepreneurs, app developers, and programmers to create innovative apps and websites using open public data.
• Identify opportunities to brainstorm, capture, design, and even deploy valuable software applications that serve the city.
• Bring together local government officials, municipal employees, experts, programmers, designers, citizens and journalists to share thoughts on the City of Louisville’s open data portal.
• Foster communities of practice and advocacy on the role of the civic innovation, mobile communication, online information, and open data at the City of Louisville.
• Discover other datasets that contain public information a the city, county, and state level that should be made public (property, transit, GIS, etc).
• Create outcomes that participants will act upon after the event is over.

The event is currently sponsored and organized by YourMapper, which provides mapping local open data solutions and an open data API for your apps.  We are looking for other volunteers and sponsors now.

Sign Up

Sign up now at our Eventbrite page.  Space is limited!

Schedule

The event will be at Louisville’s iHub co-working space.

8am – Doors open, mingling, coffee, breakfast, setup

9am – Introductions and overview

9:30 – Data, project/app ideas

10 – Break into self-organized groups to work on ideas

12 – Lunch on site

1 – Continue working on ideas, finish prototype

3:30 – Present prototypes

4:30 – Next steps, mailing lists/groups, wrap-up

5 – Civic Hacking end, head off to dinner and drinks with your new friends

6 – Everything cleaned up (help if you can) and venue closed

Things to Do at the Event

Attendee Survey

Submit Projects to Hack for Change

Submit Ideas/Projects to our Gallery

Photos for Flickr Group

Tweets to: #hackforchange @civichackingday #hackville @yourmapper

Address Hacking Challenges

Use the Hackpad

What to Bring

Your laptop, power cables, software, smart phones, chargers, monitors, mice, ideas, and half finished projects.

How to Prepare

Familiarize yourself with at these data sources to see what’s out there:

• Louisville Open Data Portal
• Data.gov
• TARC’s Transit Feed
• YourMapper (get a free account and API key before the event)
• Metro Mapper’s Local Open Data Lists

The event is meant to be a technical programming, app building, hacking experience.  We will be working together to build actual apps during the event.

If you are non-technical, we still need your help.  During the event entrepreneurs  business, marketing, and regular citizens can help steer the direction of the development and explore great ideas with the techies, and work on the presentation and communitating the idea clearly.  You can also spend some time updating your neighborhood’s Open Street Map data using the new iD online editing tool.

Official Louisville Twitter tag: #hackville

Monetary Sponsors

Food and Drink Sponsors

In-Kind Sponsors

Volunteers

Michael Schnuerle (organizer) - YourMapper

Kelby Price (venue) - Piyvt

Patrick Smith (food) - Map Grapher

Dannie Gregoire (media) - Digital Louisville

Jim Smith

Media Coverage

Insider Louisville (part 2) (part 3 recap)

Forge Louisville

Startup Louisville

WFPL (NPR)

City of Louisville

This weekend, Your Mapper participated in the national Code Across America: A Week of Civic Innovation event, the Code for America Hack-a-Thon, and pulled in a first place prize!

The city of Louisville, the Mayor’s Office, Economic Growth and Innovation director Ted Smith, Louisville CIO Beth Niblock, and LVL1 hosted the event, organized by the Code for America fellows, Laura Meixell, Marcin Wichary, and Shaunak Kashyap.

Using the Your Mapper API

The App

Today we launched a significant number of new features for our online maps that we think will really help you visualize the data you want to see better than ever.  Google announced many of these upgrades to their API last week, so we thought we’d quickly add them for our users.

Heatmaps

The first of these is a heatmap overlay option for your current search.

Heatmap Dataset Overlays

This allows you to visualize where all the points in the active dataset are at once.  Zoom out from your current search to see everything at-a-glance.  The heatmaps update along with your category, date range, and keyword searches.

If you notice a dense area you want to check out, just click the map and you will be prompted to recenter you search to see markers with detailed popups.  Click the checkbox in the map info area to toggle the heatmap layer on and off.

Style

The second addition is a crisp, unique map style.

Clean Map Styles

The muted colors and simplified details allow you to really focus on the data you need, while still letting you easily find your bearing.

Multiple Layers

The third addition is allowing you to overlay any number of multiple searches and datasets on the same map.

Multiple Dataset Overlays

This has been requested by many users, and now it’s as easy as clicking the checkbox in the other data area.  While on, any search you do will overlay on top of the existing one, as many times as you like.  You can overlay searches from the same or different datasets.  Just click the ‘clear map’ link to remove them and start over.

More Overlays

In addition to our existing live traffic, bicycle routes, and photos overlays, we’ve added live global cloud coverage and public transit routes.

Clouds and Transit Layers

Access them in the top right of the map under More… Make sure to zoom out to see the cloud coverage and note that Google has only made transit visible in a few major cities for now.

Feedback

What do you think? Let us know in the comments what you like or don’t like about these new features.  Can you think of ways to improve their usefulness or usability?  Are there more features you’d like to see?

The Your Mapper iPhone app gives you access to all of our national, state, and local data anywhere you are.

We want to make it easy for you to discover your surroundings, save favorite searches, and share what you find.

Features include much of what you can do browsing our website maps, plus:

• Location Detection – discover what’s around you at any time.
• Favorites – save locations, searches, and places within the app.
• Filter – category, date, and keyword, and map your results.
• Email – share interesting searches and places you discover.
• API – built entirely using our public API.
• Data – all of the data on our website, in your pocket.

Data Integration

All the data in the app, including nearby locations, dataset lists, place details, and dataset info comes directly from our Open API service. You can integrate any of our data into your applications and websites.

Advertising

The app is free, and we are offering geo-fenced in-app advertising per dataset from local businesses. Read about the details of our sponsorship program and how to target your local prospects.

More Data Coming

We are in the process of gathering and loading more data from city, state, and federal sources. If you know of a great local dataset in your area, point us to it and we’ll get it loaded so you can use it within the app!

App Developer

iOS development was created with perfection by Eric Roland. Find out more about Eric here: Twitter | Facebook

Screenshots

GovMapper has been selected by KSTC for the respected Kentucky Enterprise Fund grant this year!

Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation

GovMapper helps local governments get their data online for the public. This grant will help us reach more city and state governments across the nation, and show them how to open data for their citizens, promoting transparency and saving them tax-payer money at the same time.

More about the grant from the KEF website:

The Kentucky Enterprise Fund (KEF) is a state-funded, venture capital-like fund that invests in Kentucky-based seed and early stage technology companies. Companies seeking funding from KEF go through a rigorous due diligence process and are judged in terms of industry fit, return on investment, and potential for economic development.

Special thanks goes to Louisville’s local ICC office and the members of GLI’s Enterprise Corp for their guidance and assistance, and of course the members of KSTC who we have worked closely with during the application and interview process over the last few months.

Our biggest challenge to getting great public data online is forging a human relationship with the decision makers in local governments.  When we make a connection to the individuals in charge, we can show them the benefits of putting their data online and how easy the process is.

This connection to local government almost always requires a face-to-face relationship built over time, which is why we have decided to reach out to local citizens for help.

If you refer someone in your city government and they decide to map their data after talking with us, we’ll give you $25 to $75 once the map goes live.  A website called Referral Key makes this process easy and trackable.

Refer GovMapper to Your Local Government

We hope this monetary incentive will be more effective than just asking our users to talk to people in their local government, and provide a big Thank You to you!  Let us know if you have any questions or other ideas in the comments.  Thanks for helping to make our service even better, and for making public data truly public.

Have you ever wanted to grab one of our maps and embed it in your website or blog post? Well now you can, and no account is required. Introducing our new Map Widgets.

Embeddable Map Widget

We’ve been using these widgets on our sites and our clients’ for a few months, and now it’s opened up to the public. Using our point-and-click Widget Builder, you can choose map features and options and get the code to cut-and-paste into your site. And the widget’s width and height automatically fits your page, so no more measuring pixels.

Customizable Features

As you can see in the Widget Builder, you have control over many of the map’s features.  A few of them are to:

1. pick your initial dataset and starting categories
2. filter by date range and/or keywords
3. choose a starting point based on a street address and/or latitude and longitude coordinate
4. toggle map details, the location list below the map, and a list of other area maps

Great for Dynamic Pages

If you have a website with dynamic pages, like specific locations or neighborhoods, you can tailor the map to these pages automatically.  Just pass a new center address, specific categories, or a custom date range or keyword into the widget to generate an entirely new map.  Our Widget Builder code uses javascript and query string parameters, so you can substitute your own values on the fly (see an example on one of our detail pages).  Getting our data in your site is a great way to separate your real estate site, news site, or blog from others.

Reporting and API Key

In conjunction with the Map Widget, we’ve activated API keys in everyone’s account home page.   Using your custom key with your widgets is totally optional, but it provides 2 main features.  First, you can track daily, monthly, and yearly usage of your embedded maps with our API Reports in your account.  It will give you a breakdown of usage on any of the domains that you have widgets on.  Second, it will give you three times the standard free daily widget views (from 200 to 600 – above this and you’ll need a paid account with us).

Older Embedded Maps

Previously, to embed one of our maps on your site, you would have needed an account.  Then you would have created a map on our site and got some code to embed.  But if you wanted to make changes to the map, you’d have to log back in and update the features, then update your code again.  These older maps will continue to work, but if you want a faster map, with a list of locations below it, and with more features, you might want to upgrade your maps with our new widget code.

Feedback and Site Promotion

Let us know what you think of this new feature in our feedback area, and if you are using a map or widget on your site, let us know about it and we’ll make sure to feature you on our site!

The Franklin County Kentucky PVA office is using Your Mapper’s platform to map its property values county-wide.

Franklin County KY Property Values Map

Like the Jefferson County KY PVA before them, they see the value in opening up their public information to their citizens, and putting it into an easy-to-understand visual map. It saves their office time and duplication of effort, and Patsy Conway, the current PVA, is providing a great free service for the public good.

As with all of our government open-data clients, they are using the built-in features of the Your Mapper platform. Their data is published on Your Mapper in an interactive map, in a density heatmap by category, and in a mobile version viewable on any mobile phone browser. Our site helps to ensure the data reaches as many people as possible, and all of pages credit the PVA with the data and link back to their site for more information.

With Frankfort being the state’s capitol and the county seat of Kentucky, the Franklin County PVA is leading the way for the rest of the state. Thanks to Patsy Conway, Jill Maynard, and the entire Franklin County PVA office.

The Jefferson County PVA office in Louisville KY has been, for the last 4 years, a forward thinking government agency willing to use technology to help their citizens save money.  They have utilized bird’s-eye imagery internally to cut assessment costs, launched a terrific new website designed by VIA Studio, and have used property value maps to get their public data online in a visually impressive way.  Now they have updated to Version 2 of GovMapper’s embedded maps for more features, speed, and public data.

Property Values Map Jefferson County PVA

Of course the reasons for doing this are to increase their bottom line. By putting a public map on their site, and having Your Mapper link to them from our network of sites, they get more people using their site, which means more monthly subscriptions!

Every PVA, whether in a small or large county, can increase their subscription revenue immediately by mapping their property values.

• Increase Revenue – More people will use your site when they see basic info on your map. This means more monthly subscriptions!
• Increase Site Traffic – Our platform of sites link back to you for every property. Get subscription-interested visitors you never would have had otherwise.
• Garner Voter Support – Excite your electorate by providing a visually engaging services at a net-zero cost.
• Compliment Your Other Services – Our embedded map compliments, not competes with, your existing web services.
• Respect – Citizens appreciate and respect transparency in their government.

Here is an overview of what’s new on the maps for our clients:

Location List
A clickable and sortable list of locations appears below the map.

Drag to Recenter
Drag the  “Y Guy” around the map to recenter at a new location. Or click the “use map center” button in the address area to use the center of the current view.

Export Options
Your current search data is exportable via the “more links” option at the bottom of the map. Some options are GeoRSS, KML, CSV, Google Maps, Emailing, and Mobile.

Quick Filtering
Clicking a category on the left of a map will automatically limit the results to that one category.

Streamlined
The center address, filtering, and export options are hidden by default to reduce clutter and help you focus on the map itself. They are available with one click if you need them.

Faster
Improved speed and rendering, both during the initial load and once the map is done loading.

More Data
In addition to property values, you can see foreclosures and recent residential home sales by clicking a dataset to the right of the map.

Tony Lindauer, PVA of Jefferson County, said this about our map service:

“The ease and speed of putting interactive property maps on our PVA site was astounding. The return on investment was immediate, and it would have taken us a few months of work to achieve a similar result. The maps keep people returning to our site, and display our property values in a visually engaging way.”

GovMapper will be exhibiting at the upcoming KY PVA Conference December 7-9 at the historic Brown Hotel in Louisville, and we are looking forward to showing off our revenue-generating maps to all 120 county PVA’s in Kentucky.