I specialize in the planning and implementation of technology strategies for Urban Planning projects. I use my experience with a variety of civic software to advise organizations on how technology can help them achieve their project goals. I see the technology strategy through from beginning to end.

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Within the Office of Innovation and Technology and, later, the Open Data and Digital Transformation (ODDT) group, I researched, designed, and developed processes and tools to help City departments collect, use, and release data. Among other things, my projects included:

I developed an interim Homeless Management Information System for the Office of Supportive Housing to help them avoid regressing to a paper-based data collection system, which would have jeopardized their ability to deliver HUD reports required for a significant portion of their funding. The implementation was part of an experiment to see whether Django’s Admin application would be a good platform for quickly building custom data-entry tools for departments.

I implemented an interactive data visualization of occurrences of “bullet voting” -- when voters choose only one of 5 allowed candidates for At-large Council positions -- during the 2015 City Council primary election. The visualization allowed the City Controller’s office to communicate a confusing phenomenon to the general public. The implementation used Carto’s extensions on top of Leaflet for mapping, and C3 for charting. The project was completed on a tight timeline of approximately two weeks.

I researched and began designing processes to centralize deployment, management, and reporting around the City’s ETL pipelines. Based on the challenges that we faced in ODDT around ETL, I identified and began implementing an instance of Airflow. I also began documenting recommendations on how we should be building ETL scripts, using petl as a data transformation and validation library.

I worked on a small team with amazing people on projects that empower people to get involved in planning for the future of their communities and cities. Among other projects, we worked on the following:

Starting in 2012, we developed Shareabouts, a flexible tool for gathering geography-specific public input. I was primarily responsible for developing the Django REST Framework-based Shareabouts data server, reporting tools, and core parts of the mapping interface.

In early 2014, we began working on OpenPlans, an outgrowth of our experience building tools and web sites for urban planning projects. I worked on many parts of this project: server-side data management, external service integration, APIs, browser-side interface development, and testing.

As one of Code for America's inaugural fellows, I worked with the cities of Philadelphia and Seattle to identify and extend the Change by Us platform for their needs. As part of that process, I along with my fellowship team helped Local Projects, the original authors of Change by Us, release the project as open source.

I also started the Councilmatic project. I was frustrated at the relative difficulty of accessing legislative data in Philadelphia, so started creating a scraper, and later a website for finding and subscribing to relevant artifacts of city council meetings. This project is open source and has since been adopted in several other US cities.