Louisville’s National Day of Civic Hacking event wrapped up this past Saturday May 31.  How did it go?

Success!

The event was a huge success!  The organizers, Louisville’s Civic Data Alliance, would like to thank everyone who participated including Greg Fischer (Louisville Metro’s Mayor), Ted Smith (City Innovation Director), and Tim Welsh (Metro CIO).

We had 45+ people sign up and attend.  We were part of over 100 cities, 124 events, and 10,000 participants across the nation.

Civic Data Alliance

The Civic Data Alliance is Louisville’s official Code for America brigade, and the organizing body for this year’s NDoCH.  If you want to join us, discover projects we are working on, and join our monthly meetups, please visit our site and sign up on our forums.

The Projects

We focused on 5 projects to build and ship in just 6 hours, based on data available and interest levels.  Here’s a summary of each of them.

1. WFPL Curious City

We deployed the first version of WBEZ’s Curious City Project, for WFPL in Louisville.

http://fast-ocean-3651.herokuapp.com

“What do you wonder about Louisville, the region or its people that you want WFPL to investigate?”

2. NC3 Neighborhood Editor

The Network Center for Community Change needed a way for locals to improve the accuracy of locations and mapping in the neighborhoods their volunteers and community members know.  So we built a neighborhood explorer with links to editing features easily in Open Street Map.

mapwestlou.org

“NC3 believes that community-generated data created by neighborhood residents and advocates is a powerful tool for change. With this data we are making change together, and we need you to join the movement!

NC3 has developed this web site to help introduce people to the geography of West Louisville neighborhoods, while offering an avenue to add and share data on OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world, and it’s the perfect tool to create data for West Louisville Neighborhoods that can be updated and shared by everyone. So take a look at the neighborhoods on this site and start editing!”

3. NC3 Shareabouts

NC3 also needed a way for locals to share positive locations and memories in their neighborhoods.  So we worked with them to deploy a Shareabouts platform.

http://shareabouts.louiewatch.com/

4. Shelter Helper – Adopt a Pet

Using the city’s open data portal and Metro Animal Services pet data, we built a website where you can serach, filter, and browse the available animals to adopt, and then get driving directions texted to your phone to go pick up your sweet little pet.

Full Source Code: https://github.com/bcpower/ShelterHelper

5. Louisville Minecraft

Our most ambitious project for the day was to recreate Louisville within Minecraft, just like Denmark did!  It was the only project that didn’t ship (though we got it working after the event around 6pm because people stayed to help).  But we got a good handle on the process and with the right data we know it can be done!

It did take us 2 hours to download/merge/clip less accurate data from Kentucky’s open GIS portal, since that data was not available on the city’s open data portal (which would have taken a few minutes instead).

Links we used:

• Layers we needed
• KY GIS data used
• First tutorial used (didn’t work out)
• Second tutorial used (worked)
• Louisville Raw Data: 1 square mile – All of city (4GB!) –
• Tools: Open qGIS editor – Minecraft – CraftBukkit – Our new Github Script

Roadblocks

Our biggest roadblock, which directly affected the success of 3 of the 5 projects, was the lack of open GIS and mapping data from the city of Louisville.  We had to work harder to turn to alternative, less accurate sources, and in some cases pay another company out-of-pocket for data we needed.

More Event Pictures

Info from 2014 Event Page

HACK FOR CHANGE

Hack for Change Louisville is being held as the city’s formal National Day of Civic Hacking event, one of over 119 simultaneous events across the United States. The day will bring together local government leaders and staff, local organizations, businesses, visitors, and community members and is focused on civic innovation. Here’s what to expect:

• Software development (a hackathon event) using open public data.
• Collaborative building of open data apps and services for non-profits and the community.
• Discussions on open data at the city, county, and state levels.
• Networking, learning, fun, and making a difference!

The initiative is a united national 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.

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.

Reserve your free tickets now

THE STORY

Louisville’s Code for America brigade has volunteered to organize this year’s event.  Called the Civic Data Allliance (CDA), we are the public’s voice for open data, interested in liberating, improving, gathering, defining, and reporting on public data.

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.

LOCATION

Nucleus is this year’s gracious host and location sponsor.  Last year Nucleus hosted the event as well, at their nearby iHub coworking space.

Enter in the parking lot off Floyd St directly across from iHub. Then walk in these doors:

The space is great and we’ll have a projector, mics, speaker system for music, Wi-fi, fridge, food, power strips and more!

SCHEDULE

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

9am – Introductions and overview, project tracks review

9:30 – Break into self-organized groups to work on projects

12 – Lunch on site

1 – Continue working on ideas, finish prototype

4:30 – Present prototypes and successes

5:00 – Next steps, mailing lists/groups, wrap-up

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

PROJECT TRACKS

We are pre-planning a number of projects for this year’s event, idenifying resources and laying the groundwork in advance.  You can align yourself with one of these projects we hope to ship by the end of the day, or come with your own ideas.

• Help one of our non-profits (list coming soon) get their data online for the public
• Create an open data portal on CDA website (or yours) using CKAN, and fill it with community data
• Use Louisville GIS data to build the city in Minecraft, like Denmark
• Getting data from Louisville’s Air Quality Eggs
• Editing Open Street Map in your neighborhood
• Setup Curious City for a local non-profit
• Deploy Shareabouts crowdsourced mapping application for a non-profit
• Map trails and points of interest for Bernheim Forest
• Take raw Olmsted Parks data and visualize new tree plantings in Shelby Park

At this event, we are going to focus on finishing a product in just 7 hours. Just like at Hacktucky, the motto will be “if it doesn’t ship, it doesn’t exist!” So we’ll work together to make a MVP and cut features as needed. Idea, design, data, coding, UI, and hosting all needs to come together, so we need everyone’s help!

SWAG!

Big News! Google is providing $500 in Google Cloud Platform hosting for each and every attendee!

Amazon is providing $50 in free AWS credit to all attendees again this year!

And we’ve got some cool wrist bands, stickers, and a few hoodies to hand out.

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
• Join the CDA group

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.

VOLUNTEERS

We are looking for volunteers for this year’s event to help with organizing, planning, day-of activities, picking up food and drinks, etc.  Contact us at the Civic Data Alliance, Louisville’s Code for America brigade and the organizing body for this year’s NDoCH. Sign up and post at the official Civic Data Alliance forums and look there and on Twitter for meetup times.

HASHTAGS

Our hashtag is #hackville.  Our local organizer’s handle is @CivicDataAlly. The national hashtag is #hackforchange.  The national organization is @civichackingday.

RESOURCES

As a national contributor for NDoCH, YourMapper has made its open data and CrimeScore APIs open to all hackers for free!

YourMapper API – Details – Free API Ultra Plan – Github

CrimeScore API – Details – Free API Ultra Plan – Github

CLICK: See a RECAP of 2013 event.

SPONSORS

Contact us to become a food, in-kind, monetary, or sponsor, and get your logo below and shout outs at the event!

MEDIA COVERAGE

• Insider Louisville – #Hackville returns: National Day of Civic Hacking on Saturday, May 31
• WHAS11 – National Day of Civic Hacking comes to Louisville

CONTACT

Contact one of your local organizers (listed below) to find out how to help, sponsor, or if you have questions. About National Day of Civic Hacking On May 31 and June 1, 2014, we’ll be making history all over again. For the second time, the National Day of Civic Hacking will unite technologists, entrepreneurs, developers and other citizens in using open data to improve communities and the governments that serve them.

SPONSORS & PARTNERS

]]> http://blog.yourmapper.com/2014/06/hack-for-change-louisville-recap-2014/feed/ 28 http://blog.yourmapper.com/2014/03/crimescore-local-open-data-safety-api/ Mon, 24 Mar 2014 17:52:13 +0000 http://blog.yourmapper.com/?p=546

CrimeScore is a new local open data API by YourMapper that gives you a detailed safety grade at your current location.

CrimeScore: A Safety Rating for Your Location

Methodology

Coverage Areas

API Access

Directly access the CrimeScore API, with dynamic documentation and in-browser testing on Mashape.

Mashape CrimeScore API

Also, check out our GitHub repository for a server-side example using Mashape, and full code for an interactive online browser map.

Badges and Graphics

We have a variety of badges (download) you can use on your website or app that are color coded to show grades, and only require you to overlay the grade or score that we return for a location.

CrimeScore badge graphics

Pebble App

CrimeScore is a GPS enabled Pebble app that calculates a composite score based on the amount of crime in your immediate area.

Pebble CrimeScore: GPS Safety Rating

We’ve submitted it to Pebble’s online app challenge through ChallengePost.

If you have a moment, head over there and vote or leave a comment!

iPhone App

SafetyCheck is a mobile iphone app that gives you a CrimeScore rating at your current location. The app shows a rating from 1 to 10 of your current safety level, and the number of recent crimes in your area.  It uses the API to keep all the data processing server-side.

SafetyCheck Local iPhone App

Google Glass App

AskOpenData.com has integrated the CrimeScore API into his Washington DC Google Glass transit directions app called Ask Metro.  It lets you know the crime rating of the station you are headed to.

Ask Metro CrimeScore Integration

Your App?

Get starting adding a CrimeScore rating to your existing services, adding value and information for your new and existing clients.  Or come up with your own app or service based on ideas we haven’t even thought of yet!

YourMapper’s team at the Hacktucky hackathon took first place with our Next Bus project.  SND hosted their international news design conference in Louisville this year, and 5 teams participated in an intense 24 hour hackathon to ship a locally focused product.

The Next Bus, winning product

The Next Bus uses TARC’s real-time bus data, merged with curated local events.  Choose the event you like, and when you want to arrive, then get a text message 5 mintues before you need to walk out the door to make the first bus stop based on the bus’s actual location.  That’s it – dead simple!

Hacktucky Champs. Photo Diane Hawkins @heydmh

While YourMapper is no stranger to hackathons, hosting a National Day of Civic Hacking event, winning Code for America’s hackathon with SafetyCheck, and hosting Louisville’s first Transportation Camp, our pre-determined team this time included amazing designers and experts.  Liz Spangler (designer for The Charlotte Observer) , Amy King (art director at The Washington Post), and Patrick Smith (GIS and urban planning expert at City Collaborative) rounded out the team with YourMapper founder Michael Schnuerle.

SNDlou Closing Gala

The SND coference brought together hundreds of news publication designers, editors, reporters, and managers to Louisville for their annual conference.  Next year’s conference will be in Frankfurt Germany, and Louisville was lucky to have it here, thanks to the work of Ryan Hildebrandt.  The first annual Hacktucky event was wonderfully orchestrated (I know how hard these can be to organize) by Chris Courtney.

Hacking with the Greats. Photo Amy King.

The other teams were also fantastic, creating things like a real-time emergency alert system, historic sites mapping game, bourbon flight recommendation app, and a sticker/badge attractions site for families. I welcome them to add their details and pitches to the comments in this post.

Our project focussed on a few goals and use cases.  Here is our 2 mintue pitch.

The Next Bus offers a creative strategy for promoting more transit use… for better acquainting people with their local bus system, while providing an outlet for spontaneous, spur of the moment urban adventures.

So we have a problem in Louisville, where not enough people are using public transit (the ACS estimates less that 4% of workers commute by bus). Everybody is in their car too much of the time in Louisville, and we wanted to make something that helped impact that.

Some of the issues around this are…  some people think riding the bus isn’t cool, some people don’t like the uncertainty of not knowing if their bus is going to be there on time or at all..

The Next Bus shows people how simple and fun it can be to use public transport because we’re connecting real time bus GPS information with a curated list of local events and destinations that capture the unique flavor of Louisville… and then giving them what they need to get on the next bus, get to their closest bus stop and know when the bus is going to be there… so this would linking to events like local theater, gallery openings, music, dinner and drink specials, pop up markets, food truck parkings, etc …

There is an even a text reminder function that lets the user know when they need to walk out the door  to get the bus stop in time.

The idea is that local entertainment writers or cultural critics will deploy the tool on their blogs or news organizations web sites, transmitting their daily list of interesting events and things to do to their trusting readers. In terms of the shelf life… local writers could schedule updates that coincide with what their into that week or month…

So we are encouraging ridership, creating an incentive to use local transit… showing people how fun it can be to ride the bus and to get out and discover (or rediscover) some of the great local flavor in your city.

Congrats to our team’s home run of design, functionality, and hard work!

Hackucky Louisville Slugger Champions. Photo Patrick Smith.

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.