Amy Dusto chronicles city’s tech scene in 2010, 2011 for Johns Hopkins thesis

A photo of the scene at Baltimore’s second Startup Weekend.
Writer Amy Dusto spent several months in 2010 and 2011 hanging out with members of Baltimore’s tech community, an experience that informed a thesis she wrote for Johns Hopkins University, as well as an article she wrote about Baltimore’s first civic hackathon with Open Baltimore data for now-defunct Urbanite magazine.
Jonathan Julian, co-organizer of the Baltimore JavaScript Meetup group, recently posted Dusto’s thesis in full on his website.

In her thesis, Dusto recounts the opening of Beehive Baltimore, speaks to such well-known entrepreneurs as Dave Troy and Ron Schmelzer and shares some of the history about the advent of the Open Baltimore data portal.

On January 26, 2011, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake signed into order an initiative attempting to make government more transparent, accessible, and accountable for everyone; a digital warehouse for getting public information would be put online in a portal known as Open Baltimore. The portal contains databases of information ranging from 311 calls to crime reports to property taxes. … The hope is that people from citizens to private companies will use the data to invent software applications (or “apps”) that offer creative solutions to city problems. [more]