Introducing Omaha Parks

A couple of weeks ago, I participated in Mozilla’s Global Sprint. My project, Omaha Parks, sought to map the city’s parks and open spaces and allow users to search for the features of the parks they were most interested in.

I’m pleased to finally have the project online! It’s certainly not the end of the road for this project, and we’re happy to find new collaborators as we think about next steps. But I’m thrilled about what we pulled off over two days.

The Sprint this year was incredible. There were 108 open source projects across twenty countries that participated this year. That resulted in 302 pull requests, 2,223 comments and issues, and 824 commits pushed to Github. Working with the Mozilla team was wonderful, and I really enjoyed the process of creating and managing projects all inside of Github. Mozilla was incredibly responsive and supportive throughout the entire process.

The Sprint also introduced me to some new people in the community who are interested in similar issues, folks I probably wouldn’t have otherwise met. This included faculty and staff at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, community organizations like Open Nebraska and the Omaha Community Foundation, and others in the city interested in open projects and open data. After two days of coffee, several participants, one cake, and a handful of bagels, we had a map — and, I have a better idea about the city’s existing open data infrastructure.

I’m already cooking up another idea for next year’s Sprint, so you can bet I’ll be back!

[I’ll likely move the map to a different server before too long. When I do, I’ll make note of it here.]