Volume 11: This Week in Civic Tech/Open Data

This week is a short one. A lot of tweets though :)

Visualizations

London Arts Map

The collated data on the capital’s cultural locations is hoped to support local authorities, property developers and associations develop existing clusters and build creative infrastructure

This map is a great start and typically for these kind of maps, where you throw a lot of data at the user. The clusters are a good way to convey the right amount of information. But once you click further these symbols appear and make it really hard to see and read the map.

Takeway: Be careful when to use symbols. Especially if you have a lot of data to show.

Mega Cities

This is a great looking map with an interesting projection that serves the data well.

Takeaway:
Map Projections can help you display data differently and make data more readable.

County profiles

Takeaway:
Sometimes your visualization needs more explanations. Make sure to include them.


Civic Tech/Open Data

Civic Tech Guide

Your guide to tech for public good. By @mstem, @mlsif, and people like you. A crowdsourced, global collection of civic tech tools and projects since 1994.

If you haven’t seen it in the last weeks check out the Civic Tech Guide. They add more and more every week.

Quarterly post about Civic tech in Canada

These quarterly blog posts share the latest happenings from Canada’s civic tech groups, and highlight the benefits they’re delivering in their communities.

Overcoming Barriers: Identifying challenges for CalFresh applicants without stable housing

We wanted to learn more about people experiencing homelessness and their experiences applying for CalFresh benefits online. To do so, we interviewed 40 GetCalFresh users experiencing homelessness about the enrollment process, conducted in-person outreach to help individuals living outside with their applications, and analyzed 62,000 applications submitted in 2018.

g0v Grant: Taiwan’s The Homeless Helper makes best use of every resources.

Homeless is a project that tries to consolidate resources to solve the issue of uneven resource distribution.

18F’s four favorite projects of 2018

To continue our birthday celebrations, we’re saluting those projects and partners that inspired our team to do their best to improve the user experience of government. We asked staff from acquisitions to strategy to share what project they loved working on during the past year. We received many fabulous nominations, and we’re sharing with you the top four submissions (in no particular order).

New Maryland open data portal cuts down duplicate records

The Maryland Department of Information Technology announced Thursday a refresh of the state’s open data portal that’s expected to heighten access to government information for non-technical users and better organize the state’s internal data use.

The Pathway Forward for Mapping Broadband Speeds in America

As a country, we need to do a better job mapping broadband availability and speeds. Local policy makers and digital inclusion champions need this information to make decisions about where to focus their efforts and where additional broadband infrastructure should be built.

We are excited to share that the next step of development will kick off in April at Hack for a Cause in Eugene, Oregon.


Tweets


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