April and May 2017 News for Open Cleveland by Will Skora

17 May 2017

April and May has been a busy time for Open Cleveland and our collaborative partners here in Cleveland. Here’s what happening and where we’re going.

GCRTA, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, released data for the real-time locations of their buses and trains last week!

For the first time, this includes the locations of buses and rapids as they move! The publication is the result of multiple years of efforts from RTA and encouragement by Open Cleveland and other advocates.

Interested in delving into RTA’s data? Want to use it to improve service, make it easier for fellow Clevelanders to use the RTA, analyze if RTA buses arrive on schedule, measure coverage and frequency, or any other ideas with the data?

Come to our next hack night on Wednesday, May 24th, at 6:00 p.m.

Need inspiration for how the RTA transit data can be used? The awesome-transit guide has plenty of examples. The real-time bus data is in the GTFS-RT specification.

This week, Will S. will be representing Open Cleveland and fellow Open Cleveland brigader April U. will be representing The Center on Urban Poverty Center & Neighborhood Development at the NNIP conference in Baltimore.

Recap: CMHA, the area public housing authority, and Digital C held a hackathon at CSU on April 7 & 8th. It focused on helping Clevelanders in the Housing Choice Voucher program better select well-resourced neighborhoods that meet their needs.

Recap: DataDaysCLE, our inaugural three-day conference on data in Cleveland, was a success thanks to all of our partners (listed below). Here’s a great synopsis and video of DataDaysCLE by Dan Hansen.

Lastly, Open Cleveland has been collaborating with Hack Cleveland, Open NEO, Digital C, Case’s Urban Poverty Center, Cleveland Co-Lab and Cleveland City Councilman Brian Cummins on events including Transparency Camp and DataDaysCLE over the past year.

Collectively called the Cleveland Open Data & Civic Tech Collaborative, our organizations have been meeting to learn if and how we should formally organize and establish goals, and continue collaborating around our shared interests of utilizing data and technology for the public good.

How to stay in touch:

http://www.meetup.com/open-cleveland - Meetup group where our meetings and events are scheduled

https://opencleveland.slack.com - Slack channel where Open Cleveland brigaders chat in between meetings, sharing happen in between meetings (invite required. need an invite? email opencleveland at gmail dot com)

https://twitter.com/opencleveland

https://github.com/opencleveland - our code repository