#openlexington

This Saturday, OpenLexington and DrinkTank will be hosting National Day of Civic Hacking at our MakeTime office!

This week's city spotlight is none other than tech guru extraordinaire, Chad Cottle. Chad is a huge ally to the Code for America Lexingteam, and we love seeing him when we're in town!

Who is Chad Cottle?

Chad is the Director of Enterprise Solutions for Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government. This means he's in charge of IT programs and IT security for the city, and is one of the touchstones for making sure that the city's computer systems are running smoothly! 

What else can he do?

Chad is the city partner for OpenLexington, Lexington's Code for America brigade, and Collexion, a local hackerspace. He was instrumental in getting the city's open data portal off the ground as the Chair of Lexington's Open Data/Open Government initiative. He is majorly focused on promoting transparency in government and pushing local technologists to get involved in the civic space, and he desires to make the tech community in Lexington a more welcoming and diverse place!

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Post by Chad Cottle.

Chad seems super cool!

He is! One super cool thing he did was invite us (Livien and Lyzi) to speak to his daughter's Girl Scouts troop back in February about being ladies in the technology field. We got a chance to talk about internet safety and some of the things that are possible with computers, and then we all worked together to create our own custom web maps of Lexington!

Thanks, Chad, for being so rad.

Lexington neighborhoods, classified by council district.

One of the coolest things we encountered during our time in Lexington was the city's Open Data Portal. The site, launched in November 2012, provides free and unlimited access to a whole bunch of datasets owned and maintained by the city of Lexington.

But what does that mean? What is open data, and why would you use it? How would you use it?

As of the last few years, open data and transparency have been placed at the forefront of priority lists for governments all around the world. As defined by Open Definition, "[a] piece of data or content is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike." From the federal government all the way down to local jurisdictions like Lexington, government agencies are taking steps to open their data to allow citizens to learn more about the place they live and become more involved in civic life.

What kinds of data show up on open data portals?

Typically, a large portion of open data is geographic data. Geographic data is the stuff that maps are made of – the lines that make up roads, the shapes that make up parks and buildings, and the markers that tell us where things are. You can take these different files – the roads dataset, the parks dataset, the buildings dataset – and layer them on top of each other to make a map, because the data includes location information. It's really cool stuff. (If you're interested in learning more about maps and how they're made, check out mapschool.io.)

What would one do with this data?

The value in open data comes from analyzing it and building applications from it. For example, Lexington's Open Data Portal includes historical council district data, so we could make something that shows how council districts have changed over time. It also has a dataset of hospitals, so we could make an application that finds the closest hospital to a given location.

Is there anything else on the open data portal?

Yes! The open data portal also has an applications page, which lists more places you might be able to find data and links to some applications that have been created using the data. One of the awesome apps using open data is called MapIt!. Created by the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (LFUCG) GIS Department, the app allows users to type in their addresses and see lots of cool information about where they live – property valuation information, nearby landmarks, and voting districts, to just name a few. Such a cool way to learn about

Who were the awesome people who made it?

Credit for this awesome tool goes to Chad Cottle, Director of Enterprise IT Solutions at LFUCG, Awesome Inc co-founder Nick Such, and the rest of the great folks at LFUCG. Also heavily involved in the process was OpenLexington, Lexington's Code for America Brigade.