The OpenAccessPhilly public-private, open gov movement highlighted by April’s OpenDataPhilly.org launch, has helped spur another group in Tennessee.
Months after OpenDataPhilly.org was discussed at the Chaos Conference in Berlin, a group of civic hackers and good government-minded officials used the site’s open source framework built by Azavea to launch OpenChattanooga.com.
Visit OpenChattannooga here.
The site was built during the 48 Hour Launch program from the Company Lab this past weekend and organized by Tim Moreland, an analyst with the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Agency, and Teal Thibaud, a communications director at community vision group Chatanooga STAND.
“Right now Open Chattanooga is just a collection of interested individuals without any formalized structure or support. The group consists of city employees, nonprofit organizations, interested citizens, local tech geeks and people in higher education to name a few,” Moreland tells Technically Philly.
A major theme of the OpenDataPhilly.org story is that the City of Philadelphia had already released some meaningful data sets, particularly in the GIS space, so the open data portal serves as nothing more than a catalog, directing users to available data. The next step for the local site is to grow the data API output from the city. Getting to even that point for Chattanooga is going to require more effort, says Moreland.
There is interest from the Chattanooga city government, he adds.
“We have been in contact with the City of Chattanooga and have found them very receptive to our work. Currently we are trying to work out what a more formalized partnership between Open Chattanooga and the city would look like and how it would function,” he said. “Open Chattanooga wants to be a resource for city government by partnering with them to provide tools, datasets and apps that are useful to its citizens.”
That may sound familiar, so it’s no surprise the OpenChattanooga group found OpenDataPhilly.
“I’ve been following the work of a lot of other open cities initiatives elsewhere and have been really impressed by the work going on in Philly. One of the main ideas behind Open Chattanooga is leveraging the amazing work being done elsewhere and porting it to Chattanooga. In talking with some of the people involved with OpenAccessPhilly and OpenDataPhilly it seems like they have a very similar structure to Open Chattanooga so it makes sense that we would be drawn to their work.”
OpenChattanooga is updating those interested on Twitter and Facebook.
Moreland wanted to highlight Katherine Currin, also from STAND, and design and development help from Ben Huffine, Rina Hatcher and Ashley Frasier.
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