Code for Atlanta September Updates: Open Checkbook Launches

This week, the City of Atlanta launched their Open Checkbook, an open data portal of expenditure and vendor data. In addition to their online explorer, you can also download the data as bulk CSV files.

On Twitter, Maggie Lee noted that 59% of the expenditure data records don’t have a description. There are 104,672 expenditure records. What have you found? We’ll dig into the data at our upcoming civic hack nights.

Events

The Tech Square ATL show-and-tell on Connected Cities is happening on Monday, September 13 from 3:00 to 5:00 pm. It’ll be at The Garage in Tech Square. We’ll be there talking about the Open Data Opportunity.

Then a few hours later in the same space, we’ll host our Civic Hack Night at 6:30 pm. Two weeks later on Tuesday, September 25 we’ll have Civic Hack Night at Atlanta Tech Village. We’ll be running voter registration drives at both hack nights. The deadline to register to vote for November’s election is October 9.

Projects

We’ve been steadily plugging away at several projects during civic hack nights. Attending our hack nights is the best way to get involved in our projects. We’ve also posted the Slack channel (#channel-name) for each project group below. Join our Slack if you haven’t yet and want to get in touch with a group.

• AgLanta (#aglanta): We’re working with the City of Atlanta’s Mayor’s Office of Resilience on their urban agriculture and healthy fresh food initiatives. This partnership just started at the most recent hack night, which led to this handy map of where to get fresh produce around Atlanta. The Office of Resilience has more ideas, so the partnership promises to be fruitful!
• Mobilize (#mobilize): The efforts of the Mobilize team combined with AgLanta at the most recent hack night. But before that, the team was focused on shared dockless mobility (like Bird scooters) around Atlanta. Check out this resources page for all the work they’ve done so far.
• Reentry Bank (#reentry-bank): In partnership with the Georgia Micro Enterprise Network, the Reentry Bank prepares recently incarcerated people with the resources they need to qualify for a small business loan through a traditional lender. The website is set up, and now content is being filled in.
• Library Books Scanner (#library-books): Did you know that all Atlanta-Fulton Public Library books are tagged with RFID? A technical services administrator with the library system has been coming to hack night with a Raspberry Pi to see if we can develop a low-cost way for library patrons to quickly see more information about a book they have in hand, like reviews and related titles. At the last hack night, we discovered that the RFID chips in the books can’t be easily read by the Raspberry Pi’s RFID reader. So we’re now exploring a USB Barcode Scanner that can attach to the Pi.
• Georgia Social Safety Net Survey (#safety-net): Code for America’s Integrated Benefits Initiative is doing a survey of state administered public benefits systems like SNAP and Medicaid. We’ve been filling out a survey on the technical landscape of the State of Georgia’s safety net programs.
• Civic Tech Immigration Coalition (#immigration): We’re joining with Code for America, Codeando Mexico, and The GovLab on an effort focused on helping front-line immigrant rights groups better serve vulnerable families at the border with Mexico.
• UrbanGeekz (#urbangeekz): UrbanGeekz is an African-American, Latinx, and multicultural digital news platform focused on technology, business, science, and startups. We’ve ben helping make improvements to their WordPress installation.

Leadership Team

This summer, we welcomed three new members to the Code for Atlanta leadership team. Yeti Aberra and Megan Calamusa joined in July, and Faith Wallace joined in August.