Civic Advocate

WeGovNYC Databook

Created by WeGovNYC
Launch Project
Tags:
Budget Civil Service Dashboard

How I Started

We're inspired by many of the public interest technology organizing projects around the world. The g0v project (https://g0v.asia/) founded in Taiwan, is particularly impressive. G0v initiatives deliver two types of projects: "Open data: Opening up and making data public allows the people to take a closer look at politics and important issues." "Public Tools: We build tools that empower people to evaluate their government and exert their democratic right to decide how politicians act."

How I Built This

This project has been ongoing since 2017 and continues to be a work in progress. Our latest version of Databook has been around for about a year.

We’ve indexed over 200 NYC open datasets, and normalized about 30 of them. Those normalized datasets are then republished and available via AWS S3 and loaded into an open source Carto instance that published them via its SQL API.

We then built custom interfaces to display that data with a PHP/Laravel app.


WeGovNYC @devinbalkind

Devin is a New York City based technologist passionate about bringing open source and open data solutions to the world. He is the CEO of Pruvn, a software development firm and the president of Sahana Software Foundation, a nonprofit that makes open source disaster management software. He is also a director of Sarapis, a nonprofit that makes software for other nonprofits, and the lead of WeGov.NYC, a program to improve New York City government.