February / March 2015 update by Paul Koepke

11 March 2015

Getting Started In Cleveland

Since this is our first blog post, I’ll do a little history. Open Cleveland was founded in October 2014 with the goal of encouraging open data and helping local governments in Northeast Ohio better serve their residents through technology. We are a Code for America brigade.

It’s been a busy few months since we started up. We’ve been organizing our meetings and events on Meetup. We got our website up and running. We completed an Open Data Census for Cleveland to track how open the City’s data is. We got set up on GitHub and started on a few projects, inculding the Large Lots project

Large Lots is probably our most exciting project at the moment, as it’s seeing the most progress. Large Lots (which will probably get a new name before it goes live) is a website which will help the city of Cleveland Land Bank Program display its parcels for sale and accept applications. It is based on Chicago’s Large Lots website.

On February 20-21 we held Code Across Cleveland as part of Code for America’s Code Across America event. On Friday we held an Open Data Open House at City Hall where city employees could meet some of our members and learn about open data. On Saturday we held a Code Across Cleveland meeting where we introduced new people to open data and our ongoing projects.

We always welcome new members and new ideas. Technical knowledge is not necessary – some of our biggest needs are nontechnical. Join us and help us help governments better serve their residents!