Civic Innovations

Technology, Government Innovation, and Open Data


Looking for Collaborators

I’m thinking about starting a project to develop an application that uses crime incident data from the City of San Francisco and allows people to identify crimes that occur close to their homes and/or places of business. I worked on a similar project for the original Apps for Democracy contest last year.

Crime incident data from the SF Police Department is available in KML format here. I’d like to take the data in these files – which appears to be updated daily – and populate a relational database with information on specific crime incidents, including locational information.

I’d also like to develop an application that citizens can access to identify the crime incidents that occur closest to their specific locations (home, work, or wherever they happen to be at the moment). The application would be accessible through a range of modalities – standard cell phone, micro-browser, Twitter, IM client, etc. – and would query the relational database storing crime incidents.

If anyone is interested in working on such a project, give me a shout. I’ll post updates on any progress made on such a project going forward.

Looking forward to hearing from other civic coders!

2 responses to “Looking for Collaborators”

  1. Just sent an email to Stamen to see if they’re interested in working with you. Also let me know if you have any questions on the data.

  2. Thanks, Jay!

    I’ve got some work to finish up on another open gov project and then this will be my primary focus.

    Very excited about working on this – I have some neat ideas that I’m interested in sharing with other developers looking to use SF data.

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About Me

I am the former Chief Data Officer for the City of Philadelphia. I also served as Director of Government Relations at Code for America, and as Director of the State of Delaware’s Government Information Center. For about six years, I served in the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), and helped pioneer their work with state and local governments. I also led platform evangelism efforts for TTS’ cloud platform, which supports over 30 critical federal agency systems.

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