SunLight Labs recently held it’s Great American Hackathon, an event that encourages groups in each region of the United States to gather together on one weekend and create software that will make government more open. Two Azavea employees, David Middlecamp and yours truly, participated in the Philadelphia version and also hosted the event in our offices. Josh Tauberer, a PhD candidate at U-Penn, and developer of GovTrack.us, organized the event.
Seven of us came together to create a web-based visualization and display tool based on data from the New Jersey Gang Survey 2007. The NJ State Police have been conducting these surveys every three years since 2001. Using Django, MySQL, OpenLayers, OpenStreetMap and ArcGIS Desktop, we put together a full-blown app in two days. Two analysts from the New Jersey State Police joined us on Saturday, explained the background on the data set, wrote up the text and other content for the site and answered questions on how the data was structured.
New Jersey Gang Survey Viewer
The result is The New Jersey Gang Survey Viewer. Check it out. I was amazed by how much a small group could accomplish in such a short time frame, particularly when most of the participants neither knew each other nor knew many of the technology tools when they started. The players were:
- Dean Baratta, New Jersey State Police
- Nick Cazoneri, Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission
- Robert Cheetham, Azavea
- Don Coleman, Chariot Solutions
- Peter Lynch, New Jersey State Police
- David Middlecamp, Azavea
- Josh Tauberer, Civic Impulse
