Add active projects

[werdnanoslen]

For each of the following, we need a one-sentence description and any non-github link that may be important: ✅ https://github.com/open-austin/budgetparty :x: https://github.com/open-austin/awesome-reports ✅ https://github.com/open-austin/liberate-appraisal-data ✅ https://github.com/open-austin/lobbying-in-austin ✅ https://github.com/open-austin/harris-county-bookings ✅ https://github.com/open-austin/fake-the-news

[mateoclarke]

Budget Party is a web app design for mobile devices that teaches you about the City Budget and invites you to remix how departments and services are funded. The app is part of larger project in partnership with the Austin Monitor and funded by a grant from the Mozilla Gigabit Fund to teach high schoolers about civic priorities.

Award Announcement: https://www.open-austin.org/blog/2017/02/08/budget-party-mozilla-gigabit-grant-announcement

Live URL: https://austinbudget.party

[mateoclarke]

Fake the News is a web literacy project designed to help educators and teens evaluate online news for credibility and trust to strengthen their communities’ resilience to fake news and misinformation. This project is a collaboration between Open Austin, the Austin Monitor, Nucleus Learning Network, and Civic Party Software funded by the Mozilla Foundation.

More info: https://fakenews.open-austin.org/

Not yet live URL: missionfake.news

[mateoclarke]

Harris County Bookings is a scrapper that runs daily to aggregate data from the Harris County Justice Information and Management System reports. This information is intended for researchers and non-profits looking to do studies on policing in Harris County.

The data exists as searchable CSV via the Github repository.

https://github.com/open-austin/harris-county-bookings

[mscarey]

lobbying-in-austin was an experiment with data visualization for the city's lobbyists registration database. It went dormant because we failed to find an interesting narrative in the limited data available. I think it's still in good enough shape that any future project with the lobbyist datasets should reuse this work rather than starting over.

The main product of the experiment was a chart (with no navigation) showing how many lobbyists were employed by various clients at any given time: https://www.open-austin.org/lobbying-in-austin/

[mateoclarke]

lobbying-in-austin was a success! It turned into a great blog post prodiving analysis for the community. I would love if we could do more experiements like this that result in an article about the methodology and analysis. https://www.open-austin.org/blog/2016/06/12/finding-a-story-in-austins-lobbying-data

[werdnanoslen]

@patrickm02L has been MIA here and Slack for a few days. Any other way to contact him? Or someone wanna make a provisional one-liner until he responds?

And I PM'd @johnclary on Slack, waiting on him to respond too

[johnclary]

@werdnanoslen thanks for staying on top of this. I just updated the readme with this info. Liberate Appraisal Data is an effort to open up the Travis County Appraisal District (TCAD) appraisal roll data. The annual appraisal roll consists of valuations of every parcel in the county, and includes details about the age and square footage of property improvements, the size and value of lots, jurisdictional taxing authorities, and much more.

We are asking TCAD to make the data available in an open, usable format. Key issues with the current data delivery process are as follows:

1. To obtain the appraisal roll data citizens must pay $80 per appraisal year. Electronic records are available dating back to 2007.

2. The data are delivered to citizens in an MS database. This is an arcane, proprietary format that requires special software to view.

3. TCAD's own documentation explicitly states that some of the data are not available at all (even with purchase), due to the limitations of the MS Access format.

4. Other entities (including the City of Austin) have managed to obtain copies of the data in a format other than MS Access, yet the TCAD records office insists that the data are exclusively available in the MS Access format.

5. Neighboring appraisal districts have managed to provide this data for free, in an open format. For example, WCAD: http://www.wcad.org/public-data/downloads?id=343


We (Open Austin) have proposed a few solutions:

1. Publish the appraisal roll data on our own website for the public to download.

2. TCAD could partner with the City of Austin to have the data published on the city’s open data portal. I am a City of Austin employee and would be happy to connect TCAD staff with the City’s Open Data Team.

We communicated these issues to TCAD Board of Directors chairperson Dick Lavine and the Chief Appraiser's executive assistant on April 10, 2017. Although Dick Lavine has expressed an interest in working with us, we have so far been unable to set up a follow-up meeting or get any response from the Chief Appraiser.

The obvious next step is to attend a TCAD board meeting, but unfortunately these take place monthly on a weekday in an inaccessible part of town. Another approach would be to raise money to buy all the data, reformat it, and host it.

[werdnanoslen]

@patrickm02L deleted the awesome-reports repo because he said it was only a placeholder with no code, and he wasn't excited about it anymore.

So, now that the info's all here, i'll start making updates...

[werdnanoslen]

To get this on https://www.open-austin.org/projects/, we'll need the following info:

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type: ???? categories: [ ????, ???? ] thumb: ???? screenshot: ???? featured: ????

[johnclary]

@werdnanoslen can you expand on 'type' and 'categories'? what are you looking for there?

[werdnanoslen]

Heya, sorry this was actually more of a note to self, should have mentioned that. I'm not 100% sure either. It's the template our projects page seems to use.

[werdnanoslen]

Done:

• [x] budget-party
• [x] liberate-appraisal-data
• [x] lobbying-in-austin
• [x] harris-county-bookings
• [x] fake-the-news