Code for Cary, North Carolina – Code for America
Posted by Matt Rajkowski on October 9, 2015, 2:00 PM EDT
The other night I attended a Code for Cary meeting… a part of the larger Code for America, and even larger Code For All organizations. Code for All states "Together, we enlist and support the public to create digital resources, tools and practices that result in stronger local communities and more responsive and effective governments."
So in this meeting I gathered with six others to hear and discuss local coding efforts. The whole setup is actually really interesting. Data is obtained from the city websites, sometimes downloaded directly or scraped from existing web pages. The goal is to use the data in applications… these applications are built either locally or from shared projects from any of the Code for America organizations.
I was fascinated by a few of them… CityGram for example is a platform to visualize various data… from crime, to business listings, to restaurant inspections. You can also be notified via text message or email when there's an occurrence. New York has this up and running:
There's also a single site which hosts multiple cities, like the NC Triangle region:
You can also look at the source code:
https://github.com/codeforamerica/citygram
Being a software engineer I figured I could help out in some way. Maybe build some apps.
For more information you can search for your local area's Code for America site to see which projects they're working on.
