There was a time, when any discussion of open government and open data, would have been remiss if it ignored what was happening in Portland. But those times appeared to be in our distant past. We haven’t heard anything about us doing much in — let alone leading — open gov or open data in nearly a decade. But that’s all changing. Thanks to Hack Oregon.
CIVIC is built to be a visual platform with tools for rapid development of analytics and visualizations for civic data. It’s special because our software system was designed by Hack Oregon’s volunteer teams and is intended to be maintained and developed by our methodology of organizing multi-disciplinary teams of coders, designers, domain experts, industry partners, and local government leadership around story themes.
Under the hood it’s all open source, so what’s built by one city can be shared, replicated, or improved in another. We’re strengthening our reusable component architecture on top of a robust developer environment to support big data in the cloud, and we’re excited that the projects we’re building in Portland will have (even) more impact with a relational network of other city data.
For more information, see Hack Oregon’s announcement on going national.
