Tag: smart cville

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In brief: ‘Jihadist Threat,’ local government responsiveness and more

Neighborhoods voice their concerns in a Smart Cville survey. Courtesy of Smart Cville

Chief of economic development splits

While Albemarle County is all about economic development these days, Faith McClintic lasted 19 months before departing, and cited frustration working with the Board of Supervisors as one reason for taking a job with the Virginia Economic Development Partnership in Richmond, according to Charlottesville Tomorrow.

Not Republican enough?

Downtown Business Association of Charlottesville co-chair George Benford faces fire again, this time from state Senator Tom Garrett, the GOP candidate for the 5th District, for being featured as a lifelong Republican in an ad for Dem Jane Dittmar. Garrett says Benford has contributed to Democrats the past 15 years. Benford defends his GOPness and says he supports Donald Trump—and Dittmar, the Daily Progress reports.

Understanding the Greene County threat

Sheriff Steve Smith stepped into hot water when he posted that his office would host a November 5 seminar on Islam called Understanding the Threat. Critics were unappeased when he renamed it Understanding the Jihadist Threat, and they claimed it would be biased, especially after learning there are no Muslims on the panel. PVCC, where the event is being held, has joined in the outrage.

The talk of the town

Charlottesville’s open data cheerleader, Smart Cville, founded by resident Lucas Ames, surveyed representatives of 16 local neighborhoods about residents’ biggest concerns and the rate of responsiveness of local government to those issues.

According to Smart Cville’s findings, traffic, development/zoning, crime and pedestrian/biking issues top residents’ list of concerns.

Which public problems seem the most pressing based on association meetings, public comment and your own personal opinion?

Ranked in order, residents are also concerned about:

  • Parks/public spaces
  • Other
  • Parking
  • Gentrification
  • Education, affordable housing and environmental/sustainability
  • Economic equity
  • Economic development, beautification and public transportation

Participating neighborhoods

  • Rose Hill
  • Johnson Village
  • Venable
  • Greenbrier
  • Lewis Mountain
  • Little High
  • Woolen Mills
  • Starr Hill
  • Belmont-Carlton
  • Ridge Street
  • North Downtown
  • Burnet Commons
  • Fry’s Spring
  • Robinson Woods
  • Meadows
  • Martha Jefferson

City staff is responsive to problems

Agree—70%

Disagree—25%

Don’t know—5%

City Council is responsive to problems

Agree—45%

Disagree—40%

Don’t know—15%

Quote of the week:

“People going to court aren’t necessarily in  a shopping or movie-going mode.” —Supervisor Norman Dill on Albemarle’s discussions to move its courts from downtown to spur economic development, Charlottesville Tomorrow reports.

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New web app shows how your taxes are broken down

Lucas Ames, creator of Smart Cville, hopes to leverage technology to make Charlottesville a better place to live. Photo by Ron Paris

Tackling a county budget may seem daunting, but Smart Cville tactfully lays out Albemarle’s budget in a spread of colors with its new budget visualization tool that illustrates how your money helps the county.

Smart Cville, a locally based nonprofit, aims to open up data, plain and simple. Creator Lucas Ames, 35, sent out a letter in mid-April requesting that Charlottesville adopt an open data resolution. In mid-June, the mayor convened a meeting to discuss open data as the city continues its work to further improve open-data relations between city legislatures and citizens.

“One of the reasons we are most excited about this visualization launch is that it provides the community with a good example of how citizen innovators can use technology to help solve public problems,” says Ames. “If we think back 15 or 20 years, citizens simply did not have the tools to engage with their communities in this way.”

The app helps the public understand the origin of the county’s revenues and how those revenues are allocated. Users are able to input their property taxes and fees into the website and get a complete breakdown of how the county uses their money.

Aesthetics are a fundamental element in visual learning that subsequently helps memory and data absorption. According to the Social Science Research Network, 65 percent of humans are visual learners. So, when visuals such as graphs that incorporate color, interaction and other maneuverable elements are added to mundane black and white charts, data literacy naturally improves.

“This site enables our citizens to explore county budget information and drill down into detailed spending and revenue data to clearly illustrate how the budget supports important county services,” says Lori Allshouse, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Big data, often misconstrued as something that is difficult to grasp, isn’t as bad as it seems, according to Ames.

“In terms of big data, the sky’s the limit as to how it can be used when aggregated with other communities,” says Ames.

Ames says that he and his team are committed to improving the budget visualization tool and are working with the City of Charlottesville to expand the tool to incorporate all funds. The team also has a few projects in the works in the areas of environmental sustainability and legal equity.

“As more communities open budget data, it could foster cross-municipality research that analyzes fiscal strategies,” Ames tells C-VILLE.

Those who are interested may access the budget visualization tool here.

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Get smart: Local group calls for open data policy

Lucas Ames, creator of Smart Cville, hopes to leverage technology to make Charlottesville a better place to live. Photo by Ron Paris

People actually want to know how much compost is being dropped off at City Market, Lucas Ames was surprised to learn. The creator of Smart Cville, a year-old website that publishes local data, sent a letter to City Council April 12 to ask the city to adopt an open data resolution.

Ames, the man with the plan, says the overall goal of the resolution is to foster easy access to public information and encourage civic innovators to make use of the data that is available to them. Because, after all, by 2050, about 70 percent of people will live in cities.

These growing populations, says Ames, are placing greater demands on city services. With an open data policy in which public information is made freely available on the Web in a machine-readable format, locals could rely less on their government for access to info and take matters of improving city life into their own hands, without making formal requests that Ames calls burdensome to the requestee and city staff.

With machine-readable data, Ames says “citizens can use it to create really cool apps and services” that include everything from where farmers markets are located to budget visualizations, like the one Ames published on Smart Cville’s site. The visualization helps users see where their tax money is allocated, based on their yearly tax contribution and using raw data provided by the city.

“The data is pretty much buried in one long, hard-to-understand PDF,” Ames says. “The average citizen is like ‘what?’”

Smart Cville makes those numbers easier to understand, Ames says, and he hopes to see more projects like the budget tool come from the proposed open data resolution.

“It’s amazing what citizens are willing to do,” Ames says, noting the opportunity for UVA students to get creative with open data. “We have a tremendous entrepreneurship spirit in this town. Let’s open it up and let people play.”

Smart Cville, which consists of Ames and a small board of advisers, will soon reach nonprofit status. The group’s larger goal is to “leverage technology to make Charlottesville a better place to live,” Ames says.

In 2014, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe launched an online open data portal called Data.Virginia.gov to “provide easy access to Virginia’s open data and keep Virginians informed of major initiatives that take advantage of big data,” according to a press release. The governor also called it “empowering data that can be used by citizens to make more informed decisions, by innovators to build cutting-edge applications and by community stakeholders to plan smarter projects.”

Like McAuliffe’s initiative, the resolution Ames proposes is similar to that of other cities with open data policies like Portland, Austin and San Diego.

Since Smart Cville’s inception, Ames says website traffic is up and that interest among citizens is there.

Hundreds of people have checked out the site’s compost collection data and the numbers on other sustainability movements, like this year’s Fix A Leak Week. “Data and education transparency might be able to help those programs along and, at the same time, make our city more sustainable,” he says.

Check out the website at smartcville.com.